SOURCE: Annan, Gabriele. “Changeling.” New York Review of Books 34, no. 14 (24 September 1987): 3-4.

In the following review, Annan touches on John Lahr's biography of Orton and its film version, as well as The Orton Diaries and Head to Toe.

“I'm inclined to think,” Joe Orton wrote in his diary in March 1967, “that the main fascination of Swift (as with Dylan Thomas, Brendan Behan and many other writers and artists) is with his life. His art certainly doesn't warrant the merit attached to him.” It would be ironic if this turned out to be Orton's own epitaph. Doubly ironic, because the two lumpish, lusterless sentences are exactly the kind he was training himself not to write.

Orton got his life in 1978, eleven years after his death. It was written by John Lahr and called Prick Up Your Ears. Now Stephen Frears has made a film of it, and Lahr has...