Joe Orton was born in Leicester (pronounced "Les-tur"), England, an industrial city eighty miles northwest of London. on New Year's Day, 1933. The son of working-class parents-his father a gardener and his mother a factory worker - Orton was raised in a stable but emotionally barren and conventional middle-class suburban environment. His defiant homosexuality, unhappy home life. and emotionally distant relationship with his parents finally came together in the mid-1960s to produce an iconoclastic comic style that emerged in his first produced comedy-farce, Entertaining Mr. Sloane. Intent in this and all subsequent plays on questioning middle-class values, Orton specialized in suggesting that unconventional passions existed beneath conventional middle-class behavior and language.

As a teenager, Orton became devoted to amateur theatre, and after leaving school] and losing a number of mundane office jobs. he quite surprisingly won a scholarship in 1951 to London's very prestigious Royal Academy of...