Crimes of Passion: The Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell Story
Season Two is an eight-part series about the iconoclastic British dramatist Joe Orton and his boyfriend Kenneth Halliwell. Using interview excerpts and a bit of the type of creative-nonfiction found in Season 1, Penknife follows Orton and Halliwell from their humble beginnings to Orton’s mid-60’s literary stardom and their tragic ends. Their story has been told numerous times before in a biography, a biopic and two documentaries. But somehow one of its most disturbing aspects has always been glossed over or left out completely. Until now….
Penknife Season 2 delves into some very uncomfortable territory and shines light on a current controversy in Joe’s hometown of Leicester that has wide-reaching implications.
Episode 1: A Shave and a Shag
One morning in 1949 Kenneth Halliwell comes downstairs for breakfast and finds his father’s dead body awkwardly protruding from the stove. He turns off the gas, then steps over the body to boil water for tea. When he finishes his tea, he shaves and calls the neighbors to report his father’s suicide. Nearly two decades later, when Joe Orton’s mother dies, his response is to pick up an irish laborer and screw him in a derelict house. Joe and Kenneth have different ways of coping with their parents’ deaths, but as young men growing up in dreary industrial England, they both have the same dream: before either considers writing, they’re both convinced that they belong on the stage. In 1951 they buy one-way tickets to London and begin a journey that will fail to bring them any success as actors but that will lead them to each other. Episode 1 chronicles the bleak childhoods that shape the pair inspiring one of them to become the most inconclastic English dramatist of the 1960s, and the other to become a murderer…
Episode 2: Golden Syrup
By 1953 Orton and Halliwell are both realizing they don’t have what it takes to make it as actors, but no matter, Halliwell is going to be a famous novelist and Joe, the less-educated and cultivated of the two, well, he’s going to be Kenneth’s secretary. In time though, Joe recognizes his own passion and talent for writing and the two men start writing collaboratively, determined to make it big. Shunning society and material comfort they spend the better part of a decade locked in their bedsit writing and living off rice, sardines and golden syrup. By decade’s end they’ve written a handful of novels and plays all of which have been promptly turned down by publishers. The men not only feel rejected, they feel angry. And they’re going to do something about it…
Episode 3: Malicious Damage
At his local library branch Joe Orton is enraged to find out that they don’t have a copy of Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. In retaliation for this grave injustice he and Kenneth Halliwell begin a multi-year campaign of stealing books from the library, artfully doctoring them, then smuggling them back to their rightful places on the shelves. Eventually the police and the local law clerk deploy undercover agents and a sting operation in order to entrap them and Joe and Ken are sentenced to 6-month in jail. Ostensibly, its for their crimes against the library but really, as Joe puts it, “it was because we were queers.” While inside, Orton is finally separated from Halliwell and from any remaining desire to fit in. The result is liberating, particularly to his writing…
Episode 4: A Necessary Amount of Filth
Beginning in 1964, conservative England is shocked and outraged by Joe Orton’s work. In his radioplay The Ruffian on the Stair and then in his stage plays Entertaining Mr. Sloane and Loot, Orton attacks church, state and family and taunts his enemies by putting sexual ambiguous characters on stage. For some of the first times ever, gays in the theater can’’t be stereotyped as effeminate queens or tragic cases. And while this brings Joe more hatred and censorship from the right, another group of people, namely those who’re putting the swing into swinging London and leading England through a cultural revolution, absolutely adore him. Orton sells the screenrights to Loot for a near record-breaking £100,000 and 1967 begins with Joe Orton on top of the world…
Episode 5: Diary of a Somebody
In December 1966, Joe Orton begins keeping a diary that he maintains for the final eight months of his life. Along with plenty of cottaging in public lavatories the diaries chronicle the death of his mother, the success of Loot, and the writing of both a film for the Beatles and his final masterpiece, What the Butler Saw. They also cover his sex tourism trips to North Africa and the breakdown of his relationship with Kenneth Halliwell. At one point in while Tangier, feeling great about his fame, his pocketbook and his sex life, Orton worries that he and Kenneth will soon be struck down by some disaster because they are, perhaps, too happy…
Episode 6: A Deliberate Form of Frenzy
Kenneth Halliwell’s mental health is deteriorating. After he and Joe return from Tangier in July of 67, a producer friend of Joe’s calls Kenneth a “middle-aged nonentity” to his face. This stings particularly because after failing as an actor, a writer and finally as a collage artist, Kenneth can’t really deny it. His value, he believes, is in his contributions to Joe’s career, but he’s felt for some time now that he’s losing Joe. And that’s not something he’ll be able to stand. On August 9th, 1967, in a desperate effort to ensure that Joe never leaves him, Kenneth uses a hammer to bludgeon Joe to death before swallowing a fistful of pills…
Episode 7: Tangier
The story doesn’t end with Joe and Kenneth’s deaths. In fact, the most shocking part comes here: Joe Orton was a pederast. Despite the fact that Orton’s story has been told numerous times in a biography, documentaries and a biopic, and that the diaries are chockfull of what today would be called the sexual exploitation or assault of pubescent boys, this aspect of his life has always been obscured. Until now…Listener discretion is advised.
Episode 8: Twilight of the Statues, or, How to Philosophize with a Hammer
In 2019 the Leicester City Council granted preliminary approval to place a statue of Joe Orton in the city’s cultural quarter. With the help of celebrities such as Ian McKellen, Stephen Fry and Alec Baldwin, the Joe Orton Statue Appeal raised over ₤100,000 in a short time. But in 2020 statues of problematic historical figures were toppled throughout England and Leicester found itself embroiled in a controversy over whether or not to remove a statue of accused racist, and sexual predator Mahatma Gandhi. The Gandhi statue was spared, but when word got out that Joe Orton was a sex tourist who made several trips to Morocco to sleep with pubescent boys, a debate erupted in the Leicester City Council. In this final episode of Season 2 we report what’s going on in Leicester and contemplate the question: Must one have been ethically pure to be publicly commemorated in metal or stone?