THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

Homecoming leaves a residual sense of sourness and negativity. Its most notable successors, Old Times (1971), No
Man’s Land (1975), and Betrayal (1978), all extend its calculated uncertainty and its (now gentrified) hints of menace
and ominousness. All of them are distinguished by their teasing play with the disjunctions of memory and with
unstable human relationships. Old Times presents its audience with an open triangle, defined not only by its
characters, two women and a man, but also by silences, indeterminacies, and receding planes of telling and listening.
In No Man’s Land, two elderly men, and two younger ones, seem to shift in relationship to one another; they know
and do not know; they remember and obliterate memory. Betrayal, cleverly based on a series of retrogressions, deals,
ostensibly realistically, with middle-class adultery in literary London (though its reiterated ideas, words, and phrases
reveal how artificially it is patterned). Since One for the Road (1984), Pinter’s plays have shifted away from
developed representations of uncertainty towards a far more terse and more overtly political drama. Both One for the
Road and Mountain Language (1988) are insistently concerned with language and with acts of interrogation. As in
The Birthday Party, language is seen as the means by which power can be exercised and as something that can be
defined and manipulated to suit the ends of those who actually hold power. Nevertheless, the two plays focus on
individuals threatened no longer by an unspecified menace, as Stanley was, but by the palpable oppression of
(unnamed) modern states. Where Pinter’s earlier work had allowed for indeterminacy, his latest work seems to have
surrendered to an insistent demand for moral definition. The ideas of ‘them’ and ‘us’, which were once open, subtle,
fluid categories, have been replaced by a rigid partisanship.
‘If I ever hear you accuse the police of using violence on a prisoner in custody again’, Inspector Truscott
announces in Joe Orton’s Loot (1966), ‘I’ll take you down to the station and beat the eyes out of your head.’ As all his
plays suggest, Orton (1933-67) has quite as refined a sense of the potential of the state, its institutions, and its human
instruments to oppress the citizen as has Pinter. He had good reason to distrust the political system under which he
lived, and, by extension, all systems of authority and control. He was an active, not to say promiscuous, homosexual in
a period when homosexual acts between consenting males were still regarded as a criminal offence. He was himself
brutally murdered by his long-term companion, and erstwhile collaborator, Kenneth Halliwell. In 1962 Orton and
Halliwell had been prosecuted on the relatively trivial charge of stealing and defacing library books and sent to prison
by a particularly authoritarian magistrate. Orton the artist fought back against authority with the two weapons he
wielded most efficiently: anarchic comedy and priapic energy.
[p. 624]
The five major comedies that Orton completed before his untimely death — Entertaining Mr Sloane (19g64), Loot
(1966, published 1967), The Ruffian on the Stair, The Erpingham Camp (both 1967), and What the Butler Saw (1969)
— were calculated to outrage. When, in whimsical mood, he took to writing to the press and to theatre managers
under the nom de plume of Edna Welthorpe (Mrs), he was parodying the kind of bourgeois respectability against
which he had long defined himself. But what Edna described as his ‘nauseating work’ and his ‘endless parade of
mental and physical perversion’ were not just symptomatic expressions of the liberal 1960s, but gestures of protest
extrapolated from a long and perfectly respectable comic tradition. Orton never simply hid behind jokes. His comedy
served not simply to expose the folly of the fool, the double standards of the hypocrite, or the unbalanced humours of
everyman, but to disrupt the very status quo. Pompous asses though they may be, Orton’s villains, such as Erpingham,
are no fools. Caught out though they may be, Orton’s fools, such as Drs Rance and Prentice, are no innocents.
Exploited, abused, and tormented though they may be, Orton’s innocents, such as McLeavy, are no wronged
paragons. In The Erpingham Camp, the camp’s owner may dream a vulgarian’s dream of a future England sprouting
‘Entertainment Centres’ from coast to coast, but, as the play makes clear, Erpingham is as much in the business of
social control as are the posturing psychiatrists, Rance and Prentice, and his sordid camp is as much a metaphor for
an over-organized and explosively revolutionary state as is the private clinic of What the Butler Saw. Revolutions may
be waylaid by guile and incompetence, but in no sense can the meek inherit Orton’s earth. As McLeavy is dragged
away by the police in Loot, he first protests his innocence and then wildly exclaims: ‘Oh, what a terrible thing to
happen to a man who’s been kissed by the Pope.’ In none of Orton’s plays can innocence ever be a defence. For a man
to be obliged to exit in the arms of police officers while recalling another man’s kiss sounds more like carelessness
than pathos.
Orton does not simply exploit the traditional forms of comedy and farce, but also dangerously transforms them. He
takes an anarchist’s delight in fostering disorder, but none at all in seeing why order can or ought to reassert itself.
When he gestures to a Pinterian inconsequentiality at the opening of The Ruffian on the Stair he adds a double
entendre of his own by giving Mike an appointment with a man in the toilet at King’s Cross station. Even when he
uses the conventional embarrassments of farce — its undressings, its incongruous dressings, and its cross-dressings
— he manages to render them not merely suggestive but distinctly suspicious. Kath’s removal of Sloane’s trousers in
Entertaining Mr Sloane is accompanied by the knowing declaration: ‘I’ve been doing my washing today and I haven’t
a stitch on ... I’m in the rude under this dress. I tell you because you’re bound to have noticed ...’. Alternatively, when