SOURCE: Sinfield, Alan. “Who Was Afraid of Joe Orton?” Textual Practice 4, no. 2 (summer 1990): 259-77.

In the following essay, Sinfield deals with the ways in which Orton's plays increased awareness of and toleration for homosexual culture, while at the same time limiting his audience.

OSCAR Wilde:

[Secrecy] seems to be the one thing that can make modern life mysterious or marvellous to us. The commonest thing is delightful if one only hides it.(1) 

JOE Orton:

The whole trouble with Western Society today is the lack of anything worth concealing.(2) 

Joe Orton went to study at the Royal Academy for Dramatic Art in 1951, in the heyday of Terence Rattigan, Whitehall farces, religious verse-drama and Agatha Christie. The Wolfenden Report on homosexuality was still six years away, and the film Victim ten. Theatre was often ‘queer’, but it was always discreet. In the late 1950s, Orton showed no interest in the...