Joe Orton

Entertaining Mr Sloane (eBook, ePUB)

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

Published fifty years after the premiere of Entertaining Mr Sloane in 1964, and with a new introduction, this anniversary edition offers an opportunity to reappraise Joe Orton's reputation, and the status of his first major play, from a twenty-first century perspective.

When it first appeared in the Swinging Sixties, Orton's satire on social and sexual hypocrisy both scandalized and delighted audiences. Its mix of sexuality and violence was explosive. Within a year, the play was being performed around the world and went on to be adapted for film and television, establishing Orton as a major voice and this play as one of the most ground-breaking of the century. This anniversary edition features previously unpublished material from the Joe Orton Archive, an interview with director Nick Bagnall, and an introduction by Emma Parker, Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Leicester.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Bloomsbury UK eBooks
• Seitenzahl: 144
• Erscheinungstermin: 22. Mai 2014
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781472522054
• Artikelnr.: 40730502

Autorenporträt

Joe Orton (1933-1967) was an English playwright noted for his black comedies, which combine genteel dialogue with violent and shocking action. Orton left home at 16 to train as an actor. His subversive style of humour first revealed itself in a bizarre incident in 1962, when he and his lover, Kenneth Halliwell were jailed for defacing library books. The two had carefully removed jacket blurbs from middle-brow novels and substituted their own, mostly scatological, counterfeits.
Orton delighted in shocking audiences by breaking taboos surrounding sexuality and death in conventionally structured 'black' farces involving epigrammatic dialogue and frenetic, convoluted plots. Thus, in Entertaining Mr Sloane (1964), a young lodger attempts to lure a woman and her brother into providing him with all he needs, only to find he has become each one's sexual plaything; Loot (1965) is a parody of a detective story involving much comic business with a coffin and a corpse; and What the Butler Saw (1969) stylishly turns farce on its head.
Orton was a homosexual in a period before the liberalization of British law, and this side of his life is described in detail in his posthumously published diaries. He was battered to death by Halliwell (who subsequently committed suicide) during a domestic argument at their home in Islington, North London.

Rezensionen

Entertaining Mr Sloane retains its power to provoke and startle. Telegraph