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Orton’s art of collage
• THE article on playwright Joe Orton and his lover Kenneth Halliwell does the pair a disservice, no doubt unintentional, when the library book incident is discussed by using words such as “vandalised”, “damaged” and “abuse” (Murder at the Angel, September 28).
The couple did, in fact, consider what they were doing was “art” and not childish defacing.
When they collaged the covers of some Arden Shakespeares with bright, dynamic images, this was to say how dull, uninspired and irrelevant the plain typography was.
The budgie on the Osborne cover is, in fact, a canary (a cutout from a plate that was inside Exotic Cage Birds), because the play is about a copper’s nark.
The closest they could be said to be irresponsible spray-can vandals would be the louche and spurious blurbs they added, not to pulp fiction, but to respectable Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers vicarage-mayhem crime novels.
The gorilla in the roses was a lemur (from the same book used to adorn Exotic Cage Birds). These and the surreal Turkish wrestlers carefully disguised into a series of books about Playwrights and Actors were to poke fun in a cheeky monkey kind of way at “establishment luvvies”.
Their interventions (and the pretty scary outcome) make Banksy’s efforts to “epater la bourgeoisie” seem rather tame and acceptable. In a way, Banksy could do with a little spell in clink – he might learn something.
JIM PENNINGTON
Mount View Road, N4
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