Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #287756 in Books
• Published on: 1994-01-12
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 448 pages

Customer Reviews

The Great Master Of Brutal Comedy
Although he is considered among England's greatest playwrights, today Joe Orton (1933-1967) is better known for the way in which he died--his head beaten in with a hammer by his long-time lover Kenneth Halliwell--than for his works. It is a bitter and ridiculous irony that might have been lifted from one of his own plays. It is also a great pity, for Orton was a comic genius whose plays equal the best of English with from Congreve to Wilde to Coward. And if you like your comedy with an ample edge of mean-spiritedness, brutality, cruelty, and flat-out viciousness, Orton is the man for you.

THE COMPLETE PLAYS is not as complete as the title implies, for the text leaves out several titles that never received any production during Orton's lifetime. Still, it does collect the major titles, and that in itself is enough to earn it a place on any serious play-reader's shelf.

Originally presented as a BBC radio program, THE RUFFIAN ON THE STAIR presents the story of Joyce, an unmarried woman of dubious background who is now under the control of Mike, an older man who has mysterious assignations that lead to a fateful encounter with a boy hairdresser named Wilson--whose lover (or brother, depending on how you think about it) may have been a victim of one of Mike's covert operations. It got Orton noticed, and his next effort would truly put him on the map: ENTERTAINING MR. SLOANE was and is one of the salaciously funny comedies ever brought to the stage, the wickedly funny tale of an aging sex-crazed woman and her homosexual brother who use their father's murder as a means of blackmailing a young thug into their respective beds.

THE GOOD AND FAITHFUL SERVANT, THE ERPINGHAM CAMP, and FUNERAL GAMES have much to offer but are actually minor titles in comparison with the two plays that critics consider great masterpieces: LOOT, a bitterly savage farce concerning a robbery, a death in the family, and the uses to which you can put Mother's coffin (not to mention false teeth) in a pinch; and WHAT THE BUTLER SAW, set in a psychiatrist's office in which everyone has truly gone round the bend.

Orton was a master of language that forces you to laugh even as it cuts you like a straight-edged razor across the throat; you can't help but laugh even as you collapse bleeding to the floor. Even so, it is worth pointing out that plays are really written to be performed rather than read, and this particularly true of Orton; unless you have a very strong background in theatre you may do better to wait for your local rep company to take up the challenge.

GFT, Amazon Reviewer

The Best Since Oscar Wilde?
"Hal: Bury her naked? My own mum? Its a Fruedian nightmare!"...or something like that. Too bad his own death was an act of violence too

Droll plays with no redeeming value whatsoever.
Tragic, brutal things happen to the characters in these plays. But none of these people is particularly likeable, so you can't really care. It's all just as well for them, in some ways, and it's all in good fun. The characters manipulate each other, lie to each other, steal from each other, screw each other, kill each other, and deny that they do it. Everyone here has the ethics of a doorknob, and it's all pretty enjoyable.

The last one, "What The Butler Saw", got a little bit too ridiculously farcical for my taste and went on too long, but it has its moments; and otherwise they're all pretty good to read.

I can also recommend the introduction. Joe Orton lived his own life very much like the people in his plays (which makes you wonder how much of his material was supposed to be comedy). Even his death was true to form: his envious lover, actor Kenneth Halliwell, bashed in Orton's brains with a hammer just prior to doing himself in with 22 sleeping tablets.