When you hear about successful people’s lives, there is often an inspirational school teacher involved. But I don’t think Joe Orton had one. Instead, he had Kenneth Halliwell, his boyfriend, who was everything rolled into one: a mentor, literary pathfinder and a terrible maiden aunt. They had met at Rada in 1951. Kenneth was seven years older and in the early years, supported him financially. At Joe’s centre was his concern for the quality and future of his writing, and Kenneth shared that. They were both line-by-line obsessed with Joe’s work.
I was 18 and had just been kicked out of teacher training college when Joe discovered me. I was acting in the play Boy Dudgeon by Ray Jenkins, on the radio in 1963. Joe heard it and asked for me to do his early play, The Ruffian on the Stair, for BBC radio the following year. I was at Rada by then and we recorded it between terms, with me playing the ruffian, Wilson, who comes into the lives of a couple, with dark and comic consequences. When I met Joe I remember thinking that I had never seen anyone wearing a whiter T-shirt. He had style, schoolboy-meets-West Side Story – basketball boots, jeans with a deep turn-up and this very white T-shirt. He was fantastically charming.
A couple of years later, when I had joined the Royal Court theatre, The Ruffian on the Stair was put on one Sunday night and again, I played Wilson. The play was a great success. All the powerful people were there – theatre producers Oscar Lewenstein and Michael White, and agent Peggy Ramsay. Joe’s fortunes though had taken a bit of a dip. He’d had a great success with his first performed stage play Entertaining Mr Sloane, but the touring version of his next, Loot, did not do well. However, now Joe and Kenneth sensed that success would be theirs again.
That night sparked a determination to revive Loot. In 1966, it opened at the Jeannetta Cochrane theatre in Holborn before moving to the Criterion theatre in the West End. It got rave reviews and went on to win several awards. I played Hal. When Joe and Kenneth came to the first night, I remember the pride with which they walked down the street. My mother and father were walking in front of them and my mother was mouthing: “Are they homosexuals?”
I did 400 performances of Loot. Two of the other actors, Simon Ward and Sheila Ballantine, and I were like Joe’s youth club. He got into the habit of calling in to see us, although he was also checking up on the play. He reminded me of a racehorse owner visiting the paddock. If I had any problems with the director I could phone Joe, and I would be defended. He was very protective of his work.
Harold Pinter, who Joe became friends with, tended to deliver something he’d written and that was it – it was a finished product and he didn’t want it to be altered. Joe would rework things, like they did with the old American musicals, rewriting on the road.
We became friends outside the theatre. We would meet up at Simon Ward’s house, or at Joe and Kenneth’s bedsit in Islington. I remember going there one day and listening to the soundtrack of the musical Pal Joey. They’d bought tons of old-fashioned cream cakes. The walls were covered in a collage of images – there were renaissance pictures, and one image of a baby being born out of the heart of Africa. The montages look striking in photos of Joe at home, but when you were actually there they were very vivid and you felt a bit attacked by it.
A month before Joe was killed by Kenneth, we all went to see The Desert Song, a 1920s operetta. We had gone to mock it, although Joe behaved rather well because he didn’t want to upset all the old ladies in the audience who thought it was marvellous. Afterwards, we went to the Seven Stars restaurant in the West End, which was popular with actors, and holiday snaps from Joe and Kenneth’s recent trip to Morocco were passed round, some of which were of Joe’s cock. It was remarkable for the time – the chemist Boots would have printed them for him.
Joe and Kenneth got on very well when they were linked in making mischief together. Joe created “Edna Welthorpe” who would write letters of complaint to people, and he and Kenneth were both given prison sentences for defacing library books. But soon their paths became divergent. Joe started to become very successful, while Kenneth’s writing and art career stalled. They would be invited to smart dinners and parties, where Kenneth, ever more insecure and paranoid, would behave badly.
At some point, Kenneth became suspicious that something was going on between Joe and I (there wasn’t) and became unpleasant to me. Loot had won best play at the Evening Standard theatre awards in 1966, and a scene was shown on television. Afterwards, Kenneth said “you all looked so pretty” and turned to me and added “which was strange for you because you’re very ugly really”.
It was Sheila Ballantine who had a sense that something terrible would happen. One night, Joe was away in Leicester overseeing a production of Entertaining Mr Sloane and Kenneth came to the theatre on his own, which he’d never done before. He was on a collection of prescription drugs and seemed in a bad way.
We heard about Joe’s murder and Kenneth’s suicide the day after it happened. More information kept emerging – that the bodies were together, that Kenneth had bludgeoned Joe’s head with a hammer. We were doing a performance of Loot that night. Simon and I drove in to do the show and as we were coming past Sadler’s Wells, the car in front of us ran over a dog and the wheel of the car crushed the dog’s head. Everything felt as if it was happening in slow motion. It was like being underwater. Then we had to go on stage that night and do this farce. I didn’t feel quite there, and I could almost taste blood. Of course, the theatre was packed.
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