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Chas' Program Notes
The Swinging Sixties of London are typically remembered by the popular stereotype presented in the first two Austin Powers films: a time of “mod” culture, sexual revolution, the Beatles, Twiggy, and youth rebellion. This rebellion wasn’t merely a generational conflict—young people fighting against what they perceived to be corrupt and lifeless institutions that had been established by the older generation—but also a class upheaval. Many of those participating in the London subculture originated from a working class background but thanks to the newly enshrined English post-war Welfare State, had been granted access to a previously unseen level of social amenities: public education, a secure job market, and unprecedented class mobility. For the first time in English history, therefore, the lower classes had sufficient social and financial stability to conduct a revolution. So: what were they rebelling against?
The revolutions of the Sixties can be seen as lashing out against a backlash, an élitist socio-cultural coup d’état that had occurred over the course of the 1950s. The establishment of the Welfare State immediately after World War II threatened England’s upper classes, who feared a working class revolution would occur in England similar to that which had taken place in Russia. Aided, however, by the publication of George Orwell’s two most famous novels: Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)—both of which questioned the Soviet system of Communism and were thus appropriated by British Conservatives as examples of where outright socialism would inevitably lead—and the patriotic after-effects of the 1952 coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, the upper class slowly regained control of English hearts and minds.
A significant aspect of this political shift was the restoration of cultural authority. As the English upper class perceived it, the establishment of the Welfare State had allowed the working class to gain access to something that had rightfully been their exclusive domain: high culture. In response to this, England’s upper class actively turned to the arts, claiming that, through their existence and patronage alone, great works of art and high culture might be supported and perpetrated. As a byproduct of this move, the dominant Middle Class abandoned the Working Class who had been their allies in the establishment of the Welfare State. Now, access to high culture became portrayed by the middle class as a stepping stone towards upward mobility; they turned to upholding upper class values through such institutions as the BBC’s “Third Programme,” which was devoted to broadcasting primarily high culture entertainments. It was within this stifling cultural backlash that Joe Orton’s generation came of age—and against which they rose up in a drastic, if not violent, rebellion.
Joe Orton was born John Kingsley Orton to working class parents. His father was a factory worker and later a gardener for the city of Leicester; his mother was a cold, domineering woman with strong class aspirations. The childhood described by Joe’s younger sister, Leonie Orton-Barnett, is not a pretty one: “For my mother, I think love was a luxury. She was cruel basically. The abuse was both physical and verbal. … She seemed to get some sort of satisfaction from it.” This family dynamic—an ineffectual father and an abusive and pretentious mother—most definitely informed his voice as a playwright later in life. As Leonie notes, “You can see from the names she gave us that she had ideas above her station. She was quite a pretentious woman and I think you can see digs at that kind of thing in Joe’s plays.”
After failing his eleven plus exams (which determine the educational or occupational track English youth will take for the rest of their lives), Joe was originally sent to commercial college, with the expectation he’d graduate to become a secretary or a clerk. Orton, however, was fascinated by the theatre, and took elocution lessons to help himself get rid of several speech impediments so that he could perform on the stage. His elocution teacher later remarked, “His people were ordinary working-class people. There was no culture, no education. I felt sorry for him.” After ridding himself of a slight lisp and several Leicester colloquialisms, however, Orton gained admission to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, where he met his lover, Kenneth Halliwell.
Halliwell came from a more educated background and is often attributed with introducing Orton to the cultural sophistication that his elocution teacher had maintained he’d lacked. This introduction came in the form of an attack on the very culture Orton acquired. After failed stints at being actors, stage managers, and novelists, the pair became pranksters. They stole library books from the Islington public libraries, scrawling absurd or obscene drawings on their dust jackets, texts, or pictures. The pair of them would then smuggle the books back into the library and hide in discrete corners where they could watch patrons pick up a book only to discover the graffiti inside, amusedly taking in the alarmed reactions. As a librarian remembered him, Orton was “someone who betrayed his working-class origins” by defacing, as one critic put it, the “stepping-stones to one’s advancement up the rigid class hierarchy.” The pair were eventually tracked down and arrested for their acts of vandalism, receiving six month jail terms, which Orton saw as an excessive punishment for the crime committed. Indeed, he considered the sentence a judgment about his and Halliwell’s homosexuality.
Homosexuality was illegal in England at the time and homosexuals were considered to be degenerates who disturbed the post-war calm. Perhaps more importantly, they defied the carefully-delineated British class hierarchy. Since the time of Oscar Wilde—when upper-class aesthetes began to pursue attractions to brawny working class men—many male-male homosexual relationships in England were considered to be unacceptable associations between members of different classes. This posed a real problem in a post-war Britain striving to maintain class distinctions; as the literary critic Alan Sinfield puts it: “The homosexual leisure-class, literary intellectual was, therefore, in a strikingly contradictory position. He was inviting in the working class that was believed to be about to overwhelm civilized standards. He was a Trojan horse within the citadel of cultural power, smuggling in the class enemy.” Such an alliance was viewed as a threat to the recently stabilized social order equivalent to the previous century’s anxiety over Lady Chatterly’s romance with her gamekeeper.
To be sure, Orton and Halliwell’s relationship posed just such a threat to the established order, and it was likely because of this that they received excessively harsh sentences. In his work, Orton rejects this understanding of homosexuality; in one of his diary entries, he references a relationship between two male characters: “Americans see homosexuality in terms of fag and drag. This isn’t my vision of the universal brotherhood. They must be perfectly ordinary boys who happen to be fucking each other.” Undeniably, the affront to his sexual preference provided by his extended jail time angered Orton and sparked his creative impulses. Reflecting upon his experience in prison, he wrote in his diaries: “Before I had been vaguely conscious of something rotting somewhere; prison crystallized this. The old whore society really lifted up her skirts and the stench was pretty foul.” In Loot, Orton confronts that “old whore.” As he notes in his diaries: “I am writing a play to show all the inanities and stupidities I’ve undergone.” Like his escapades in library book defacement, the play aims to upend its audience’s preconceived notions and dearly-held values, offering scathing critiques of society and its corrupt institutions.
This critique is particularly of its time; in the 1960s, England was becoming more aware of the corruption within state-sponsored institutions through the trial of Detective-Sergeant Harold “Tanky” Challenor. Challenor was a WWII war hero who was indicted for planting evidence. The trial set off a surge of scandal investigations into the slowly nationalizing British police force and badly damaged public opinion of the police. To understand how damaging this case was, one must understand that the representation of the British police in the public imagination was the morally-upstanding bobby George Dixon who, on Dixon of Dock Green—a Dragnet-like television show—began each week’s programme with a cheery “Evening all” stated straight into the camera. Challenor was no Dixon; he was caught planting evidence—a brick—on a protestor, claiming “You’re fucking nicked, my beauty. Boo the Queen, would you?” and punctuating that with a series of slaps around the head. Challenor was arrested and later diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. To his death, Challenor was supported by his fellow soldiers as well as his entire generation and, in spite of his corrupt history, “remained a revered comrade-in-arms.” This continued support of institutional hypocrisy was what most offended Orton and the younger generation he represented; they saw it as the equivalent of Ford pardoning Nixon.
Corruption came to be seen throughout the entire Welfare State. Whether it was seeing the Church, the police force, or the government as tainted, people became cognizant of the world they lived in, and Orton, especially in Loot demands we become so. The legacy of the Swinging Sixties has been a “consciousness revolution” where attention is brought to subjects that middle class respectability would prefer we not explore. More than anything, Loot asks us to shed this desire for respectability—and the silence that accompanies it—and to become consciously aware of the exploitive institutions and persons surrounding us. It is in this manner, highlighting society’s various corruptions, that Orton is one of the best examples of the sub-culture and time period from which he emerged.
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