SOURCE: Helfer, Richard. “Ruining Civilization.” Lambda Book Report 8, no. 5 (December 1999): 25-6.

In the following review, Helfer says that Fred and Madge deserves staging but is less enthusiastic about Between Us Girls and The Visitors.

Like Hemingway, Joe Orton is having a prolific posthumous career. Between Us Girls and The Visitors and Fred and Madge are part of a large amount of writing done before Orton's fame.

Between Us Girls is a novel from 1957. Some might be surprised to see an Orton novel, but that was how he started writing, first in collaboration with Kenneth Halliwell, his lover and eventual murderer, and then on his own. It is, or starts out as, the diary of Susan Hope, a well-read but not very bright English girl with a desire to enter show business. Orton makes much of her inability to see the seediness of the jobs offered her. She leaves...