Prick Up Your Ears at The Comedy Theatre

Prick Up Your Ears depicts the difficult relationship between Joe Orton and his lover Kenneth Halliwell. Based on true-events, the playwright Simon Bent has used John Lahr’s biography of Orton as his starting point. And this is where the production hits its first major flaw in that it doesn’t tell us anything new about the lives of Orton and Halliwell. Anyone who has read the Joe Orton’s diaries or seen the film based on them (also entitled Prick Up Your Ears) would be well aware of the outcome. This play needed to do something different or at least show us something new. Unfortunately it did neither. However, its saving grace was the performances. Matt Lucas’s Halliwell was a bubbling, neurotic failed writer, crippled into self-loathing by Orton’s success. In comparison Chris New’s Orton was a swaggering, self-confident, highly sexed individual. The higher Orton’s star became the lower Halliwell sank. As Mrs Corden the housekeeper, Gwen Taylor got the funniest lines in the production, (which she gleefully played upon) making the play at times feel like one of Orton’s own comedies. However she also brought a depth of feeling to the part, which made her more than just a walk-on comedy role.
The set was a tight ‘box’ modelled exactly on the dimensions of Halliwell and Orton’s room. Throughout the production the audience got the sense of the claustrophobia the two men must have felt. As Halliwell’s frustration and paranoia grew so did the collage he built on the wall until it consumed the space, making the cramped set feel even more oppressed. All in all this was an entertaining piece of theatre with some strong performances, but sadly it failed to say anything new about Orton and Halliwell’s tragic relationship