Orton’s style is contagious and much of my first script was written in Ortonese. This would have been a mistake and in later versions I wrote it out. Orton’s language is above all theatrical and not suited to a naturalistic film. (It’s for this reason that the films of Entertaining Mr Sloane and Loot don’t seem to me to work.) However, to write in this oblique and epigrammatic way is both a temptation and a pleasure, and I have indulged myself a little, chiefly in the character of Mrs Sugden. From Orton’s own diary there is almost no direct quotation, but a line like ‘My vagina came up like a football’ is not one for which I can take the credit.

The screenplay is not an exact transcript of the film in that I have included some scenes that had to be cut in the editing. Shorter is usually better, and although we lost some good laughs there was general agreement about the cuts, with one exception. This was the final scene in which Peggy Ramsay and the Lahrs go and look at the Orton flat as it is (supposedly) today. Now a bright and cheerful place, they find it lived in by a young couple. The girl is all smiles but the young man is plainly impatient with the visitors and as he ushers them out we see that in this marriage, too, there are going to be problems. This seems to me a wittier and more thoughtful ending than the scattering of the ashes which is how the film now ends. Perhaps, too, the young man’s ‘Have you seen enough?’ echoes some of my own ambivalent feelings about gossip and biography, and about Orton himself.

CAST AND CREDITS

Prick Up Your Ears opened in London in the Spring of 1987.
The cast was as follows: