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John Lahr—New Yorker critic, novelist, and biographer of his father Bert Lahr (Notes on a Cowardly Lion)—reconstructs both the life and death of Joe Orton in another extraordinary biography that was chosen Book of the Year by Truman Capote and Nobel Prize-winning novelist Patrick White when it first appeared in 1978.
"I have high hopes of dying in my prime," Joe Orton confided to his diary in July, 1967. Less than one month later, Britain's most promising comic playwright was murdered by his lover in the London flat they had shared for fifteen years. Lahr chronicles Orton's working-class childhood and stagestruck adolescence, the scandals and disasters of his early professional years, and the brief, glittering success of his blistering comedies, Entertaining Mr. Sloane, Loot, and What the Butler Saw.
Prick Up Your Ears is a watershed biography; it paved the way for Orton's revival and ensured his rightful place in the English repertoire.
| Price | Condition | Delivery | Seller | Action |
| $99.99 | Digital |
| WonderClub |
Lisa Lumpkin
reviewed Prick Up Your Ears on June 14, 2011
Prick Up Your Ears
John Lahr has the first and last word on Joe Orton, and it doesn't feel right. I've read his foreword to Orton's diary, his foreword to Orton's collected works and this, his Orton biography. I'm thinking:
1) Lahr's narrative is so powerful that when Lahr interviews people for a BBC documentary (youtube), they tell the same anecdotes back at him as he set them down in the biography. I'm suspicious. Doesn't anyone have a different take? Lahr seems to avoid a "this is my assessment of Joe Orton" approach and goes for "This Is Joe Orton. Nailed." And there are elements that must be controversial: we do not know that Joe planned to leave Kenneth.
2) I think that Lahr finds it really hard to forget that Kenneth kills Joe at the end. He has something of the approach of a Whig historian; everything in Joe's life signposts to the murder at the end. Really? Is this how our lives work?
3) This is a literary biography; Lahr is looking for Orton in his plays. But Orton isn't Shakespeare; he wrote three full length plays and, crucially, many of the people Orton met are still alive. It would be possible to talk to them. I felt that I wanted more of this. What was Orton like in prison? Surely there are records of the prisoners and prison officers he would have known. Did they have anything interesting to say?
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