Joe Orton
1933 - 1967
Commemorating the fiftieth anniversary since Joe Orton's murder
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‘The sudden appearance from a void of four decades of… previously unpublished works by Joe Orton is a cultural event of the first magnitude’
San Francisco Chronicle
The two novels in this volume mark the beginning and the end of the seven-year-long writing partnership of Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell. Lord Cucumber was written in 1954 only a year after they graduated from RADA.
Lord Cucumber is a sparkling, camp pastiche of a vintage Mills and Boon romance, set on a cruise ship in the isles of Greece.
By contrast, The Boy Hairdresser is the dark story of two would-be Angry Young Men whose tortured relationship ominously foreshadows the end of Orton and Halliwell’s own complex partnership.
Essential reading for Joe Orton fans, Lord Cucumber and The Boy Hairdresser are powerful and revealing works which reflect their authors’ scandalous lives.