A Perfectly Developed Playwright

joe orton is often described as an apolitical playwright. In a famous assessment, drama critic Kenneth Tynan divided Orton and his contemporaries into two categories: “the hairy men—heated, embattled, socially committed playwrights, like John Osborne, John Arden, and Arnold Wesker” and “the smooth men—cool, apolitical stylists, like Harold Pinter, the late Joe Orton, Christopher Hampton, Alan Ayckbourn, Simon Gray, and [Tom] Stoppard.” ¹ However, this is a misleading assessment of Orton, who always sets the individual stories of his characters within a larger, symbolic context that is critical of institutions and the institutional culture of Britain. Orton is critical of the nuclear family, of the corporation, of the police and the law, of the church, and of a psychiatric discourse that constructs facile categories such as “healthy” and “sick,” “normal” and “abnormal.” The fact that he launches this critique through the medium of well-constructed, entertaining plays that are overtly connected to the larger history of British drama—that he makes his critique of the master's house by mastering the dramatic tools of the master—should not, I believe, be held against him. Like all the best British playwrights of the time, both “hairy” and “smooth,” Orton advertises his familiarity with the history of his craft: to do so was characteristic of the late fifties and early sixties.