Included in this volume are the introductions originally published with the scripts of A Private Funotion, Prick Up Your Ears and The Madness of King George. The introduction to Prick Up Your Ears explains the circumstances in which this life of Joe Orton came to be written and the lengthy process whereby it eventually found a producer in Zenith. The earlier producers who, thinking the deal was in the bag, had then revealed their real intention to make ‘an English Cage aux Folles’ were Chrysalis Records.

This pre-production had been so protracted, though, that when at last we came to make the film I was just glad to get it out of the way so I could get on with something else. This is not the best frame of mind in which to do anything, though I can’t see how it doesn’t often afflict film-makers or at any rate scriptwriters. Besides which, as I explain in the introduction to the play, since I had mixed feelings about Orton himself it’s not surprising if I was sometimes in two minds over the film of his life.

I felt subsequently that so far as the sex scenes were concerned the film was a dry run for My Beautiful Laundrette, where Stephen Frears found a way of making the goings-on much more playful (and sexier). It was only towards the end of shooting Prick Up Your Ears that I noticed that in the bedroom scenes neither of our supposedly uninhibited characters even had their hands under the blankets.

To some extent this restraint can be put down to the times, though even in 1986 this was a little old-fashioned; and were a similar film to be made today it would need to be much more explicit (though that wouldn’t necessarily make it a better film). In the same way, I think the cottaging scene could have been earthier. It was filmed ‘artistically’ because, had it been more explicit, it would have been censored or received a harsher certificate. I have no experience of cottaging, but I’d be surprised if it was like this. Much truer in its way was a sillier lavatory scene Malcolm Mowbray improvised in A Private Function which was both funny and not implausible.

The scenes I particularly like in Prick Up Your Ears are Orton at home as a boy, Julie Walters as Orton’s mother shouting up the stairs, ‘I bet Dirk Bogarde didn’t distemper his mother’s bedspread,’ then having to bend double to avoid what she thinks is the rent-collector at the door. The scenes in Islington Public Library are also quite droll, though this, of course, is often the way with films and plays and for all I know novels: the characters who don’t carry the burden of the main plot are always the most fun to write; they’ve got time to be silly and don’t have to drive the action along.