Joe Orton

Exploring the wit, work and world of Joe Orton through his own words, and the testimony of those who knew him and worked with him.

Chris Shepherd directs a short animation in tribute to Joe Orton (Entertaining Mr Sloane, Loot) to mark the 50th anniversary of his death. Joe Orton would write letters of complaint using the pseudonym of Edna Welthorpe. Using this persona, Orton would wind up companies, vicars and even ridicule his own plays. In this short we see what mayhem ensues when Edna writes to Smedley Jams and Littlewood home catalogue service.

Pringle, leader of the Brotherhood, recieves an anonymous letter accusing his wife of adultery. He employs a private investigator, Caulfield, who discovers things are not quite that straightforward. Joe Orton's last play for television: a farce.

White golliwogs, cross-dressing coppers, bellboy rapists, insanity, incest, and Winston Churchill’s giant member all play their part in this BBC production of Joe Orton’s farcical, bitingly satirical 1969 play, in which the head psychiatrist of a lunatic asylum, when trying to conceal the attempted molestation of his new secretary from his wife, only succeeds in making himself (and everyone else) look completely round the bend.

Joyce (Judy Cornwell), a fragile former prostitute, lives a life of quiet desperation with her "husband" Mike (Michael Bryant), a thuggish, zealously Catholic hitman who uses his van for "irregular contracts." Their stagnant domesticity is shattered by the arrival of Wilson (Billy Hamon), a menacingly polite young man who has his own motives for visiting...

Mr. Sloane is a murderer. But, as both his middle-aged landlady and her homosexual brother quickly notice, he's very handsome.