The eldest of four children, Joe Orton was born to working-class parents in Leicester, England, on January 1, 1933, as John Kingsley Orton. After Joe failed his 11 plus exam, his mother, Elsie, sent him to the local Clark’s College, a secretarial school, after which Joe worked for two years as a clerk. He hated clerking but developed an interest in acting, participating in a local amateur dramatic society. In 1951 Orton won a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) in London, where he met his lifelong partner, Kenneth Halliwell. Together with Halliwell, Orton embarked upon a largely unsuccessful literary collaboration during the 1950s. In 1962 their collaboration came to an end when Orton and Halliwell were sentenced to six months imprisonment for defacing library books in north London’s Islington Library. Prison represented a turning point for Orton. “Being in the nick,” he told the Leicester Mercury in 1964, “brought detachment to my writing. I wasn’t involved any more” (Orton in Lahr, p. 152). Orton learned also to despise “society,” developing a style that came to be described as “Ortonesque”—“a peculiar mix of farce and viciousness, especially as it expresses itself in the greed, lust and aggression that lie just beneath the surface of British middle-class proprieties” (Charney, p.
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