CityLife

Prick Up Your Ears

WITH Little Britain star Matt Lucas and the fascinatingly macabre story of the murder of boy wonder playwright Joe Orton, Prick Up Your Ears is a hot ticket but currently a rather lukewarm experience.

Lucas is Kenneth Halliwell, the unsuccessful, bitter and twisted boyfriend of Orton.

The pair met at RADA in 1951, both aspiring actors and playwrights but as Orton begins to hit the big time, Halliwell is reduced to house husband, staying at home to chat with the neighbours and plaster the walls of their flat with collages.

Simon Bent has based his play on the biography by John Lahr and on Orton’s own diaries and there is more emphasis on Halliwell and trying to understand him than there was in Alan Bennett’s script for the late eighties film of the same title.

But only so much sympathy can be extended towards a man who bludgeoned his lover to death with a hammer, in the process robbing the world of the greatest writer of theatrical comedy since Oscar Wilde.

The whole play is set within the confines of Orton and Halliwell’s Islington flat.

It begins in their infamous and wildly inventive phase of defacing public library books – for which, astonishingly, they were sent to prison for six months - before it moves on to Orton’s increasing independence and success and Halliwell’s disintegrating sanity.

Little Britain

Lucas has had a fair amount of straight acting experience but, for me, there’s still vastly too much of Little Britain about his performance here.

But director Daniel Kramer seems to have encouraged caricature performances rather than probing for something deeper. Nor does he strike a cohesive tone, much of the first half in particular is unfocused.

Chris New (seen in the Royal Exchange’s Hay Fever last year and now an established West End lead) is Orton. He looks quite like him, which is certainly a help, and once past the over-the-top opening scenes he does give a restrained performance that is all the more impressive for its lack of camp.

There are occasional interruptions from the pair’s landlady Mrs Corden (a decent series of cameos by Gwen Taylor) who is really nothing more than a plot device and the script also continually drops into that so-irritating device of having characters on stage tell each other what they obviously know already, just so the audience can eavesdrop.

There have to be better ways of managing these episodes than this.

There’s a lot of work needed if this is going to be a West End hit when it gets there later this month.

Prick Up Your Ears runs until Saturday, September 5. £24 - £26. Call 0870 787 5780.

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