SOURCE: O'Connor, Patrick. “Quiet at the Back.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 5002 (12 February 1999): 19.

In the following review of Between Us Girls, Fred and Madge, and The Visitors, O'Connor offers a mostly favorable assessment of all three works.

Joe Orton kept pages of notes—words or phrases, sometimes scraps of dialogue. As he used them in his plays or stories, he would cross them off. This collage mentality pervades all his work and produces the effect of surrealism that he strove for, though it can induce irritation in the reader. Orton's is the voice from the back of the hall, at first asking pertinent questions and cracking amusing jokes. By the end of the evening, one feels like telling him to shut up.

Between Us Girls was Orton's first completed work after he had ceased to collaborate with Kenneth Halliwell, his partner and eventual murderer. Written in 1957, it is a...