All the various versions of the script have carried an epigraph from Seduction and Betrayal by Elizabeth Hardwick: ‘This is the unspoken contract of a wife and her works …’ From the start it seemed to me that the interest of Orton’s and Halliwell’s story was as an account of a marriage, or at any rate a first marriage. ‘Ken was the first wife,’ Peggy Ramsay remarks, and there is some evidence to suggest that in the final months of his life Orton was considering leaving Halliwell for someone else. The idiosyncrasies of the relationship apart, one sees many marriages like this. A young couple marry early with the husband still to make his way in the world. The wife sustains her partner through the years of struggle and endeavour, bears his first crop of children and then, just as the rewards can be expected to flow in, the husband leaves her for someone less careworn, less battle-scarred, someone more calculated to show off his new status. Never having married, I find my sympathies in these circumstances going to the wife, just as, reading Lahr’s book, I found they did to Halliwell. Whether that comes over as clearly in the film I’m not sure, nor am I sure that it should. To be stuck in the same room as Kenneth Halliwell for fifteen years can have been no joke.

On one point I have been unfair to Orton. In the film Orton’s refusal to make public acknowledgement of his debt to Halliwell is dramatised by his refusal to take Halliwell with him to the Evening Standard awards. Instead he takes Peggy Ramsay. Reading Orton’s diaries I find this is the reverse of the truth. Though he did take Peggy, Orton would have been happy to take his lover; it was Halliwell who refused to go. This was 1966, and had Orton and Halliwell gone together it would have been quite bold. Six years later I was at the same ceremony sitting at the same table as Edward Albee, who had brought along his friend. It was a gesture I suspect would have been taken for granted in America (and so not a gesture) but that still raised a few eyebrows here.