The Orton Diaries

"To be young, good-looking, healthy, famous, comparatively richandhappy is surely going against nature." When Joe Orton (19331967) wrote those words in his diary in May 1967, he was being hailed as the greatest comic playwright since Oscar Wilde for his darkly hilariousEntertaining Mr. Sloaneand the farce hitLoot, and was completingWhat the Butler Saw;but less than three months later, his longtime companion, Kenneth Halliwell, smashed in Orton's skull with a hammer before killing himself.The Orton Diaries, written during his last eight months, chronicle in a remarkably candid style his outrageously unfettered life: his literary success, capped by anEvening Standard Awardand overtures from the Beatles; his sexual escapadesat his mother's funeral, with a dwarf in Brighton, and, extensively, in Tangiers; and the breakdown of his sixteen-year "marriage" to Halliwell, the relationship that transformed and destroyed him. Edited with a superb introduction by John Lahr,The Orton Diariesis his crowning achievement.

The plays of Joe Orton (1933–1967)—Loot, What the Butler Saw, Entertaining Mr. Sloane, and others—rank with Oscar Wilde's as some of the most outrageous and hilarious of our time. He was brutally murdered by his male lover at the peak of his career.