Joe Orton was an English playwright, author, and diarist. His public career, from 1964 until his murder in 1967, was short but highly influential. During this brief period he shocked, outraged, and amused audiences with his scandalous black comedies. The adjective Ortonesque refers to work characterised by a similarly dark yet farcical cynicism. Orton met Kenneth Halliwell at RADA in 1951 and moved into a West Hampstead flat with him and two other students that June. Halliwell was seven years older than Orton; they quickly formed a strong relationship and became lovers. A lack of serious work led them to amuse themselves with pranks and hoaxes. Orton created the second self “Edna Welthorpe”, an elderly theatre snob, whom he later revived to stir controversy over his plays. Orton chose the name as an allusion to Terence Rattigan’s archetypal playgoer “Aunt Edna”. From January 1959, Orton and Halliwell began surreptitiously to remove books from several local public libraries and modify the cover art or the blurbs before returning them. A volume of poems by Sir John Betjeman was returned to the library with a new dust jacket featuring a photograph of a nearly naked, heavily tattooed middle-aged man. On 9 August 1967, Halliwell bludgeoned to death the 34-year-old Orton at their home in Noel Road with nine hammer blows to the head. Halliwell then killed himself with an overdose of Nembutal. In 1970, The Sunday Times reported that four days before the murder, Orton had told a friend that he wanted to end his relationship with Halliwell, but did not know how to go about it.
Joe Orton
