SOURCE: Keates, Jonathan. “The Devious Escape from Leicester.” Spectator 281, no. 8883 (7 November 1998): 54-6.

In the following review, Keates comments on a posthumous novel, Between Us Girls, and two posthumous plays, Fred and Madge and The Visitors.

What would have become of John Kingsley Orton if his lover Kenneth Halliwell had not chosen, on 9 August 1967 at 25 Noel Road, Islington, to beat out his brains with a hammer before committing suicide? In a sense the act was, in Cavafy's famous phrase about the barbarians, ‘a kind of solution’, not only, for obvious reasons, to Halliwell's problems with Orton's talent and success, but to certain of those unspoken yearnings through which a particular era battens on to those whose talents sculpt its profile. The murder, coming so soon after the decriminalisation of homosexuality, destroyed forever the illusion of that apparently innocent arrangement of ‘two gentlemen sharing’ with which cohabiting males had generally...