Q&A Special: Joe Orton's Sister

Play titles can acquire a life of their own. Playwright Joe Orton, who met a violent end in August 1967, didn’t have the chance to write the play that was to be called Prick Up Your Ears, but the title has lived on. And on. It was used by critic John Lahr for his 1978 biography of Orton, and by Stephen Frears for his 1987 film, which starred Gary Oldman. Now a new black comedy, written by Simon Bent and currently at the Comedy Theatre in the West End, uses the same title, with its naughty anagram - just shuffle the letters of the last word and you’ll see what I mean.

The play, which stars Chris New as Orton and Little Britain’s Matt Lucas as his lover Halliwell, who murdered Orton and then committed suicide, focuses on the long relationship between the two men, who lived together after meeting at RADA in 1951. I talked to Leonie Orton Barnett, Joe’s youngest sister, who was born in 1944, about the play and about her brother.

ALEKS SIERZ: When did you first hear about this new play version?

LEONIE ORTON BARNETT: Tom [Erhardt of Casarotto Ramsay], our agent, told me that there was this guy called Simon Bent who had written a play, Prick Up Your Ears, and he asked me what I thought. Well, you can’t stop anyone writing a play, can you? It’s okay by me. It all depends on how Joe is portrayed. But then Chris [New] came to the press night of [Orton’s] Entertaining Mr Sloane [at the Trafalgar Studios, 2009] and Tom introduced us. Then I realised that, yes, he does look a little bit like my brother, much more so than Gary Oldman did.

Had anyone ever come to you before with this idea for a play?

No. John Lahr messed about with Diary of a Somebody, which went on at the Cottesloe [National Theatre, 1987], with John Sessions as Orton and Bruce Alexander as Kenneth. I don’t know, really, it was just great chunks taken out of Joe’s diary. [Orton’s agent] Peggy [Ramsay] apparently disliked John Lahr, not because he was a theatre critic but because to her he was just a journalist. I think he liked the idea of scandalising people with all that lavatory stuff in Joe’s life. I think that he really wanted to do his book and she [Peggy] was much more interested in a studiously written scholarly biography. Lahr is a good writer, but basically a journalist.

Could you talk a bit about what it was like to grow up with Joe?

The two people who influenced Joe the most were his mother and Kenneth Halliwell. If one of these two people had not been there then Joe’s writing would have been different. There were 11 years between Joe and myself, and he used to read to me, and I remember him having a nice speaking voice. After all, he had a private education, which was very unusual then. My mother sent him to public school. And I think some of the edges were probably knocked off him there. Then, in Leicester, he went into amateur dramatics and finally got into RADA [in 1951]. He was the first student from Leicester to get a local government drama award to go and study the dramatic arts. My brother made a big deal of that.

When you were growing up, there wasn’t much money in the house.

Of course not, absolutely, but that wasn’t just us. The whole estate was hand-to-mouth. Everywhere was bleak in those days. Nobody really had money. If they had money, they didn’t live on council estates. Nobody had a car. Me and my sister used to fetch our coal every Saturday from outside the gasworks.



It was a different world. I’d always be going into houses where the wife was frightened or just subservient to her husband. If the kids misbehaved, he’d get his belt off - that was typical then. But in our household, it was the total reversal. It was my mother that did the beating, and my father, it’s so sad, I feel for him. She was always goading him - he could never do anything right. When he used to creep around the house she used to call him “Creeping Jesus”. That was his nickname. She used to say, “Creeping Jesus has just come in I think…” And in every one of Joe’s plays he has a weak father figure. Like Dada in Sloane. And McLeavy in Loot. I have great sympathy for my father. And none for my mother. Really, none.

But she was one woman bringing up four kids...

Yeah, but you don’t see it like that, do you? You just remember the beatings. The “I’ve been mother and father to you kids; I’ve brought four kids up on one lung”. Wonderful lines. Because she’d had TB, you see, which collapsed one of her lungs. She’d been in a sanatorium for years. She didn’t get married until she was 26, which was relatively old in those days, in the 1930s. And I was terrified of her. Goodness gracious, I would never have brought boyfriends home to see my mother…

Did you always know that Joe was gay?

Oh no. I don’t think he was gay when he left Leicester [in 1951]. He’d only had very mild sexual experiences. There was that guy in the pictures [cinema] who was masturbating and all that. And there were the women that he met through the amateur dramatics. And he was really smitten with them. But women gave him a hard time. They didn’t take him seriously. To them, he was just a little boy. He was 16 and 17, but he looked younger.

Of course, he was looking for love. He was looking for somebody who was on his wavelength, and he found that in London. I think he really respected Kenneth. And I think that John Lahr makes the point that the idea was always that they would read and they would write together. They would get published. Or rather he, Kenneth, would get published. And he would be famous. And he would always have this pretty boyfriend. This pretty thing, Joe.

Joe was your Mum’s favourite?

Oh, absolutely. Her first child. And she was much kinder to her boys than she was to her girls. That’s all standard for the time.

In Lahr’s book, it sounds like everybody hated Halliwell. Is that true?

No, it’s not. I just don’t know where he got that from. Because Peggy certainly never gave him that idea. Peggy always said about Kenneth, after Joe’s success, “Poor Kenneth, he fell behind.” And that’s a direct quote. And I suppose that [after Joe’s success] people didn’t want Kenneth. Joe had outgrown that life. That monkish existence that they lived in the early days, in the flat. He clearly left it behind, and then you see Kenneth became, as they say, the fly in the ointment.

Don’t forget that in the beginning Kenneth was Joe’s mainstay; Kenneth was the mentor. He said, “This is what we’re going to read; this is how we’re going to think,” you know. He taught him manners, he taught him mannerisms, he taught him all sorts of fundamental stuff that Joe wouldn’t have known. Joe wouldn’t have known how to socialise with people. But then Joe took to it like a fish to water and satirised it all. He challenged society’s fervently held moral values through satire, exploding myth after myth. So Peggy’s right in many ways. Poor Kenneth did fall behind. And then he was ill. And I think it is significant that Joe’s last play [What the Butler Saw] was set in a psychiatrist’s clinic. Poor Kenneth was in an absolute mess. He was taking anti-depressants, Mogadon to make him sleep. It’s a bit like Michael Jackson, isn’t it? Uppers and downers all over the place.

So Kenneth was taking all these tablets, and I also think that, if they had been alive today, he could have asked for help, and Joe could have gone with him to a psychiatrist. Joe could have gone with him to hospital appointments; he could have been a support in that capacity. But you couldn’t do that in those days: being gay was illegal, you could go to prison.

And this whole thing about the way that Kenneth was at first the dominant partner comes from his background. Him being an only child with a doting mother, who never went out to work, and his father a middle-class accountant. You know, so different really to Joe’s upbringing. Kenneth must have had a dominant, strong father figure while Joe’s father couldn’t have been more mouse-like.

Joe said that the reason that him and Kenneth both got six months in prison [in 1962] for defacing library books was because they were gay.

Yes, I’m sure that’s right. I don’t think Joe was wrong there. I think that he knew why they had gone down. You expect nothing, as Joe would say, and get nothing. For six months in hard prisons, like Wormwood Scrubs. How could these two have been a threat to society?

There’s no justice. Joe would say, “Did you expect any?” I mean, look at that conversation that Joe has in the diaries: Michael Bates says, “Oh, I always let the police know when I’m going on holiday.” And Joe’s absolutely squealing, saying, “They’re the ones that can rob yer!”

Did you ever talk to Joe about prison?

Not really, he sort of liked it though. He didn’t attach any stigma to it. Peggy was really impressed by the fact that he was a jailbird. She liked that idea! And living on two pounds 14 shillings a week National Assistance. Prison, I think, changed the relationship between the two of them. Joe just took it on the chin. Joe was much more streetwise, I think, than Kenneth. Kenneth had this cosseted childhood.

When did you first get involved in the Joe Orton Estate?

When he died, really. Although the royalties take care of themselves, I’ve always been there, I suppose. People asked me questions and I answered them. Unlike my brother and sister, I was sufficiently interested in Joe’s work and I wanted to understand the man that he became. Which was very different to the man I knew. Not in essentials, of course. He was always a kind and gentle man, but he did reinvent himself after he left Leicester. There’s a massive transition between John Orton of Leicester and Joe Orton of London.

When you left home, did you get married [to George Barnett] straight away?

I got married to leave home. The university option wasn’t available to me. I worked in the hosiery. Leicester was all hosiery, and Northampton next door was boot and shoe. My Dad was originally in the boot and shoe. Then he started on the parks. Because his health wasn’t good.

When Joe died I was a mother with two children, and I just imagined that I would stop in the hosiery. I worked but my husband was then a skilled engineer and he earned decent money. I had never read, really. The only stuff I’d read was The Water Babies and Enid Blyton. Alice in Wonderland. All kids' stuff, you know.

It was John Lahr’s book that started me thinking. He sent me a copy just prior to it being published [1978] and I read it, and I hated him. I was so jealous. I just thought, “This is not fair. How can he do this?” How can he sit down and write about my brother whom he didn’t know, and I knew him better than he does, and yet he can produce this book? And then I wrote to him and told him all this - and I had a letter from his wife [Anthea]. And she said something like this, “It’s about education, Leonie, and it’s as available to you as it was to Joe, only you might have bigger obstacles to overcome because you have a young family and Joe didn’t have anything else to do but to educate himself.” She also said, “It’s not the facts we learn, it’s the method.” Stretching your mind. And it just clicked.

By then I was working in a school kitchen and I had Joe’s royalties, so I decided to take a year off and get some O-Levels. I think I took about six, and there were all of these 16-year-olds, it was awful. But I passed. And then I did three A Levels.

And then I managed to get a job in a school library. And there was a really nice lady, and she said, “Do you have any library training?” And I said, no. She said, “You know, you can come to us one day a week at the main central library and we’ll teach you some library skills.” So I thought, “Oh, I’ll do that, it’s all paid for.” So I did that for about 18 months or so and then I saw an advert for Leicester University Library, where Philip Larkin started off in the cataloguing department. And that was it, really. I got a job there and worked there for 14 years.

Then I did an interview with The Guardian years later about Joe and my boss saw it and he said, “You’re Joe Orton’s sister, int yer?” And I said, “Yeah.” So he said, “Well, Joe Orton’s sister - if we’d known that we would never have given you a job here!” You know, because of him defacing those library books.

Then I went on to do Open University courses and I’ve been doing them since 1984. It’s just an insatiable thing now.

I have a friend, Jill, and we go on holiday together. And she said, “I know now why Ken killed Joe.” And I said, “Oh, why’s that?” And she said, “Well, because he did everything better than Ken could do. He even slept better.” And I sometimes think, that night [when Halliwell murdered Orton], that maybe - Joe often says in his diaries that “we talked and talked until I was exhausted”. Then he gets into bed and he can go to sleep, while Kenneth is wound up, absolutely fuming. Desperate to talk. And Joe, I can imagine him saying, “Oh, for Christ’s sake, go to sleep.” But on that last night Kenneth just couldn’t take it any more…

Prick Up Your Ears is at the Comedy Theatre, until 6 December, book tickets online. Read review here