Conclusion: The Ortonesque

Abstract

A few weeks before his death on 9 August 1967, Orton had finished typing a new version of What the Butler Saw, and he was getting ready for his next play, tentatively called Prick Up Your Ears. It was to be an ‘historical farce set on the eve of Edward VII’s coronation in 1902’. Orton already had an excellent epigraph from Sheridan’s The Critic: ‘Where history gives you a good heroic outline for a play, you may fill up with a little love at your own discretion: in doing which, nine times out of ten, you only make up a deficiency in the private history of the times’ (Lahr, p. 22). Orton’s Edwardian play was never written, so he never managed to fill it up with a little love at his own discretion. The artifice of the Edwardian era appealed to Orton, since it offered the possibility of reviving the Restoration comedy of manners, as practised by Congreve, Wycherley, Etherege, and others. Orton was alert to manners, and the appropriate style accompanying them, as a mask for morals. This was his most fundamental irony because the vulgarity, greed and lust of his characters are always peeping through no matter how elegantly they express themselves.