2017/04/10 by Graham Saunders · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Irish and British Studies #Theatre and Performance Studies
paper · doi:10.1080/14682761.2017.1309835
openalex publication_date 2017/04/10 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
In February 1967 Joe Orton submitted a sketch, entitled Until She Screams to Kenneth Tynan’s erotic review Oh! Calcutta! Orton did not live to see it performed in his lifetime, and it would not be until the show’s London opening in July 1970 that audiences would get a chance to see this last ‘new’ work by Orton. Overlooked in existing studies on Orton, this article reassesses. Screams. not only in terms of it being a precursor to some of the themes and ideas in Entertaining Mr Sloane (1964) and Loot (1966), but as an indication of what a second draft of Orton’s final full-length play What the Butler Saw (1969) might have resembled, together with the style and tone of the next play he was planning, a historical farce provisionally entitled Prick up Your Ears. The article also assesses the extent to which Orton’s sketch accommodated Tynan’s aims for Oh! Calcutta! as a celebration of sexual liberation at the end of the 1960s, and how far it subverted myths about the permissive society of the late 1960s that Orton did not live to see.