Joe Orton

Yeah, Up Against It, yes.

Up Against It, which was written by a playwright named Joe Orton.

Really? Oh, Joe Orton, yeah.

Joe Orton wrote Up Against It, but Walter Shanson thought it was a little too out there.

Yeah,

Joe Orton wrote it.

It definitely was.

Yes, it was out there.

as rude with me as you like

and actually there were a couple of films in 1970 that I really enjoyed there was entertaining mr. Sloan and loot which were based on the plays of Joe Orton very 60s very did you see the film pick up your ears which was about Joe Orton

yes Stephen Frears yeah

yeah that's about Joe because he was murdered by his boyfriend

Gary Oldman is here.

He exploded onto the movie scene in the 1980s with his portrayals of punk rocker Sid Vicious in Sid and Nancy and playwright Joe Orton in Prick Up Your Ears.

Roger Ebert called him the best young British actor around.

In recent years, he has appeared as Sirius Black in the Harry Potter films and Commissioner Gordon in Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy.

But, uh, for a lot of people historically, uh, this was a way that you stepped outside your social class and had encounters with people who had v- very different backgrounds.

Uh, and, and the nature of cruising is that you don't even necessarily have to be able to speak the same language, you know? There are all of these stories of, you know, uh, the, uh, writers like, uh, Paul Bowles and, um, uh, Joe Orton, who would go to places like Morocco to pick up boys.

And they, they weren't necessarily [laughs] able to fully communicate with these people, uh, but they were able to, you know, wink and leer and send signals with their eyes and their faces and, and their body language that, uh, enabled them to cross these cultural borders.

So it-

I was kind of mediocre as an actor, but I was working.

But a bunch of us said, "Let's start a theater company." It's a cliche, so let's start it, and we had access to a space that we didn't have to pay for, and we were all 24, and what are we gonna start with? And we came up with this double bill of two pretty intense plays, Sartre's No Exit, which is an existentialist classic, and a Joe Orton play, Ruffian on the Stair, and I directed No Sar- you know, No Exit.

And, you know, this was a time when The Washington Post reviewed it and said we were great, and suddenly we were on the map, and we did some really cool work.

But the instinct, the reason I mention it is, the instinct, which I think we need to honor throughout life, we're saying is, "Hey, let's start this." And we didn't talk ourselves out of it.

Oh, right.

right.It's Joe Orton, isn't it?

Joe Orton.

It was Joe Orton, was it, up against it? Exactly.

Whatever he called it.

Yeah.

...

the story of Joe Orton.

Mm.

And it was written as a book by a journalist called John Lahr, and then Alan Bennett got it, and he did the screenplay of it.

[laughs]

I love it.

Well, Joe, Joe Orton was a gay British playwright.

His partner, Kenneth Halliwell, murdered him with a hammer in their house, and it's, it's, it was a horrible, uh, story.

I absolutely love it.

You've, and you've directed Joe Orton though, haven't you, Paul Clayton? And that must have been, that must have been difficult.

I've tried to learn Orton.

My God, that was difficult.

Mm, yeah.

Nobody speaks naturalistically.

Mm.

I always used to use a piece of Orton as a test when I was chairman of the Actors Centre.