Prick up your ears

Gary Oldman plays Joe Orton, the enfant-terrible of English drama, a working-class Leicester lad who electrified and scandalized Londoners in the early 1960s with plays such as “Loot” and “Entertaining Mr Sloan”. Based on the biography of Orton by John Lahr (played in the film by Wallace Shawn), “Prick Up Your Ears” is a confronting and unsentimental examination of the tormented love relationship between Orton and his less successful, less charismatic lover, Kenneth Halliwell (played by Alfred Molina). The attractive and witty Orton uses his art and his life to confront the bourgeois class values of the English theatrical establishment, as well as mocking their hypocritical conservative sexual morality. His commitment to sexual promiscuity, as well as the meteoric nature of his success, enrages the shy Halliwell who can only respond with paranoid and violent behaviour. But in amongst the very serious questions the film raises about class, sexuality and violence, it also paints a convincing and colourful portrait of the beginnings of “swinging London” in the sixties. Orton and Halliwell’s milieu is one shared by Twiggy, the Beatles, and an assortment of artists and celebrities who work in repressed England, but who also holiday and cut loose in the sunshine (and cheap sex and drugs) afforded by the Mediterranean. Sharp, brutal and satirically unflattering about the English stage, “Prick Up Your Ears” is scripted by Alan Bennett and includes outstanding performances by Oldman, Molina, Vanessa Redgrave and Julie Walters.