Prick Up Your Ears

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Prick Up Your Ears
Poster for Prick Up Your Ears
Directed by	Stephen Frears
Written by	John Lahr (book) Alan Bennett (screenplay)
Starring	Gary Oldman Alfred Molina Wallace Shawn Vanessa Redgrave
Release date(s)	1987
Language	English
IMDb profile

This article is about the film. For the episode of Family Guy, see Prick Up Your Ears (Family Guy).

Prick Up Your Ears is a 1987 film about the gay playwright Joe Orton and his lover Kenneth Halliwell. (The title contains a rather obvious lewd anagram.) The screenplay was written by Alan Bennett, based on the book by John Lahr. The film stars Gary Oldman as Orton, Alfred Molina as Halliwell, Wallace Shawn as Lahr and Vanessa Redgrave as Margaret "Peggy" Ramsay. Directed by Stephen Frears.

[edit] Synopsis

The film tells the story of Orton and Halliwell in flashback, framed by sequences of John Lahr researching the book upon which the film is based with Orton's literary agent, Peggy Ramsay. Orton and Halliwell's relationship is traced from its beginnings at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts. Orton starts out as the uneducated youth to Halliwell's older faux-sophisticate. As the relationship progresses, Orton grows increasingly confident in his talent while Halliwell's writing stagnates. They fall into a parody of a traditional married couple, with Orton as the "husband" and Halliwell as the long-suffering and increasingly ignored "wife" (a situation exacerbated by Orton's inability or unwillingness, in 1960s England, to acknowledge having a male life partner). The Sunday Times magazine issue November 22, 1970 reported that on Saturday, August 5, four days before the murder, Joe went to the Chelsea Potter pub in the King's Road. He met friend Peter Nolan who later gave evidence at the inquest that Orton told him that he had another boyfriend, that he wanted finally to get rid of Halliwell but didn't know how to go about it. Finally, Orton's national standing as a brilliant playwright coupled with Halliwell's increasing marginalization and mental instability lead Halliwell to bludgeon Orton to death and then kill himself with an overdose.

Lahr's wife appears periodically though the film as his research assistant. In a subtle touch, Ramsay consistently downplays her contributions to the project, drawing the parallel between their marriage of a successful writer and unknown wife and Orton and Halliwell's.