Prick Up Your Ears
The Biography of Joe Orton
$21.95, paperback
978-0-520-22666-1
Available Now
315 pages, 6 x 9 inches, 31 b/w photographs
October 2000, Only available in Only available in the United States, Canada
Categories: Cinema & Performance Arts; Theatre; Autobiographies & Biographies
October 2000, Only available in Only available in the United States, Canada
Categories: Cinema & Performance Arts; Theatre; Autobiographies & Biographies
"An important and illuminating book...Lahr writes beautifully."—David Mamet, Chicago Tribune
"As good as literary biography gets."—Terry Teachout, New York Times Book Review
"[This] biography is sensationally exciting, as its subject would have liked. . . . [Lahr] performs unexpected feats of imaginative sympathy and critical discrimination. His Orton, instead of a gloomy homosexual 'case,' is a personality of high-voltage, carnal audacity and assurance, whose diary accounts of adventures in public toilets and vacation prowls in Tangier are guiltless, objective, and funny."—Walter Clemons, Newsweek
"Excellent . . . a valuable document for people seriously concerned with the theater, and the climate of the age."—New York Times
"Prick Up Your Ears is sharply intelligent, often inspired, and always disturbing."—Richard Gilman, Washington Post
"As good as literary biography gets."—Terry Teachout, New York Times Book Review
"[This] biography is sensationally exciting, as its subject would have liked. . . . [Lahr] performs unexpected feats of imaginative sympathy and critical discrimination. His Orton, instead of a gloomy homosexual 'case,' is a personality of high-voltage, carnal audacity and assurance, whose diary accounts of adventures in public toilets and vacation prowls in Tangier are guiltless, objective, and funny."—Walter Clemons, Newsweek
"Excellent . . . a valuable document for people seriously concerned with the theater, and the climate of the age."—New York Times
"Prick Up Your Ears is sharply intelligent, often inspired, and always disturbing."—Richard Gilman, Washington Post
John Lahr—New Yorker critic, novelist, and biographer of his father Bert Lahr (Notes on a Cowardly Lion)—reconstructs both the life and death of Joe Orton in another extraordinary biography that was chosen Book of the Year by Truman Capote and Nobel Prize-winning novelist Patrick White when it first appeared in 1978.
"I have high hopes of dying in my prime," Joe Orton confided to his diary in July, 1967. Less than one month later, Britain's most promising comic playwright was murdered by his lover in the London flat they had shared for fifteen years. Lahr chronicles Orton's working-class childhood and stagestruck adolescence, the scandals and disasters of his early professional years, and the brief, glittering success of his blistering comedies, Entertaining Mr. Sloane, Loot, and What the Butler Saw.
Prick Up Your Ears is a watershed biography; it paved the way for Orton's revival and ensured his rightful place in the English repertoire.
"I have high hopes of dying in my prime," Joe Orton confided to his diary in July, 1967. Less than one month later, Britain's most promising comic playwright was murdered by his lover in the London flat they had shared for fifteen years. Lahr chronicles Orton's working-class childhood and stagestruck adolescence, the scandals and disasters of his early professional years, and the brief, glittering success of his blistering comedies, Entertaining Mr. Sloane, Loot, and What the Butler Saw.
Prick Up Your Ears is a watershed biography; it paved the way for Orton's revival and ensured his rightful place in the English repertoire.
Show and Tell, by John Lahr
Notes on a Cowardly Lion, by John Lahr
Dame Edna Everage and the Rise of Western Civilisation, by John Lahr
Coward the Playwright, by John Lahr
Notes on a Cowardly Lion, by John Lahr
Dame Edna Everage and the Rise of Western Civilisation, by John Lahr
Coward the Playwright, by John Lahr