With its new mandate, and despite a deeply unpopular austerity programme, Wilson’s government could at last begin its social programme in earnest. And so, after a long and often bitter battle, the efforts of Wolfenden, Lord Acton and their colleagues were at last vindicated. In 1967, the Sexual Offences Act legalized homosexual relations conducted in private between consenting adults over the age of twenty-one. Amidst the relief, joy and outrage, the act also provided some light comedy. In later years, a cartoon appeared, showing two middle-aged men in a bed, in the open air. Beside them, a police officer remarks: ‘Over 21 you are, consenting you may well be, but I question the privacy of Berkeley Square.’
41
Old lace and arsenic
It is in a sense ironic that 1967 should be remembered as the ‘Summer of Love’; the previous year had produced rather more of that commodity, for it was in 1966 that London had come to flower. The realms of drama, film, art and music glittered with palaces and blazed with gardens. It was the year of Lesley Hornby, a tiny, huge-eyed ghost of a girl better known by her family’s affectionate nickname, ‘Twiggy’. Led, or misled, by her example, young girls strove for a shape that later generations would regard as emaciated.
Twiggy herself was only the newest petal on an unprecedented bloom of English fashion. Indeed, by 1966, even Italy was prepared to offer an only slightly ironic bow to English efforts. Mary Quant was hailed as ‘the queen of the miniskirt’ by Epoca, while boutiques such as ‘Lady Ellen’ and ‘Lord Kingsay’ were to be found in Milan itself. Like many of a Welsh background, Mary Quant had recast herself as English almost at the moment she arrived in London. Her mission was simply ‘to open a bouillabaisse of clothes and accessories … sweaters, scarves, shifts, hats, jewellery, and peculiar odds and ends’. This was hardly enough to distinguish her from many other designers, but she went further. She wanted, as she put it, ‘clothes that were much more for life, much more for real people, much more for being young and alive in … clothes to move and run and dance in’. It was to have huge repercussions, not so much for the country itself as for others’ perception of it. The young were the new market, and youth was all. From the King’s Road in Chelsea to the United States, her clothes – bright in colour, sharp in outline, endlessly adaptive – spread over continents. Rightly was Quant named the ‘Queen of Fashion’.
She had imagination and could tease out the silken quality in gingham, tartan, flannel and even PVC, the delight of fetishists. For her, there were no marriages of convenience between material and shape, only love matches. By 1966, she had been awarded the OBE, her companies bringing in more than £6 million a year, and five hundred designs soaring from her sewing machines annually. The boutique style also took off elsewhere, with Carnaby Street as the leader. The new clothes swirled around a new type, and indeed created it: this was the ‘dolly bird’, skinny, girlish, sexually assured and affluent. For despite the gushing of Quant and others, the new trends in fashion lay far beyond the reach of ‘dockers’ wives’. Twiggy herself was unimpressed. ‘Bazaar in the King’s Road,’ she said, ‘was for rich girls.’
It was likely, too, that the theatre was for rich patrons. The dominant item on the early-Sixties stage was still the kitchen sink. The dark, the ‘gritty’, the consciously inelegant, were paramount, just as affluent audiences expected and required. When a shift occurred, it did so teasingly.
Joe Orton was born plain ‘John’, of immaculately workingclass stock. After training as an actor, he met Kenneth Halliwell, an aspiring novelist. When Orton and Halliwell appeared in her office to discuss their joint novel, their prospective agent, Peggy Ramsay, was left with one clear impression. ‘Kenneth was the writer, John was basically his pretty and vivacious boyfriend.’ Yet it was the consort who was ultimately to wear the crown. Unlike his lover, Orton had never particularly wanted to be a writer, and this lack of vocation counted in his favour. It was writing rather than being a writer that appealed to him.
His first play, Entertaining Mr Sloane, appeared to owe much to the kitchen sink drama of the Fifties. It was set in a dank suburban household, with little in the way of glamour and a large rubbish tip outside. Kath and Ed, siblings in middle age, live with their father, Kemp. Enter Mr Sloane, a young workingclass man to whom both brother and sister find themselves irresistibly attracted. Kemp is suspicious and hostile, with some justification, for the callow ingénu of the first act soon reveals himself to be a cool, manipulative sociopath. Having impregnated Kath, he goes on to beat Kemp to death when the latter identifies him as the murderer of his former employer. Although the death is strictly manslaughter, Kath and Ed succeed in blackmailing Sloane, and he is forced to let them ‘share’ him. The unforgiving austerity of the plot is, however, belied by the play’s idiom. The flat cadences of the early scenes recede and a puckish, Wildean note intrudes. When Sloane asks whether he can be present at the baby’s birth, Ed assures him: ‘I think to be present at the conception is all any reasonable man need ask.’
Buoyed by the generosity of Terence Rattigan, the play performed well and profitably. Only a few days after the opening night, however, the papers received a letter from one ‘Edna Welthorpe (Miss)’. Indignant at the ‘filth’ displayed, she concluded that ‘today’s young playwrights take it upon themselves to insult the ordinary, decent public … the ordinary, decent public will shortly strike back – now!’ The solecism at the end was the master touch, for of course Miss Welthorpe was none other than Joe Orton himself. The forename was offered in tribute to Rattigan, who always maintained that ‘Aunt Edna’ was his ideal audience member.
Loot, Orton’s next performed work, was a black farce in which Inspector Truscott, a cheerfully corrupt policeman, investigates a burglary, only to pocket much of the titular loot before sending an entirely innocent widower to jail. The kitchen sink had yielded centre stage to the coffin, where the casket holds the stash. When faced with the proposition that it is the business of the police to protect the honest and decent, Truscott remarks, ‘I don’t know where you get these slogans, sir. You must read them on hoardings.’ This Wildean strain dances with still greater abandon in Orton’s later plays. What the Butler Saw was performed posthumously. Orton’s finest work, depicting the gradual unravelling of sanity and justice in a psychiatric ward, it ends with the cast, traduced, abused, ravished and raving, ascending a stair into the light, carrying the ‘missing parts’ of a statue of Winston Churchill. Every kind of ‘perversion’ is gleefully displayed for the audience’s disgust and delectation.
The play was jeered and heckled at its opening. Sir Ralph Richardson, who played the charming, sinister and palpably insane Dr Rance, was advised from the stalls to ‘give up your knighthood!’ Orton’s penchant for ‘black farce’ had its counterpart in what has been called the ‘comedy of menace’. Where theatre was concerned, black was a tone that leaked into the brightest palettes of the time. Harold Pinter gave tacit approval to the expression ‘comedy of menace’, but the comedic quality was not always easy to discern. He had begun to write in the late Fifties, but it was in the Sixties that his reputation began its true ascent. The Caretaker was performed in 1960, and The Homecoming six years later. In The Homecoming, the tale springs from the common motif of two strangers coming to town. In the course of the plot a husband returns from America to his workingclass family, all male, with a woman he announces as his wife. She behaves in a remarkably unwifely manner, proceeding to seduce two of his brothers in front of him. It soon becomes clear that the brothers and paterfamilias want to keep her, as sister, as mother, and as something else – a something hinted at in the word ‘business’. The husband departs for America, leaving his willing wife in the hands of his father and brothers, who comprise a brood as clinging as it is predatory. Pinter’s gift to the theatre of the Sixties was his willingness to carve in negative space, to saturate the pause and the silence with generally malevolent intent. Asked what his plays were concerned with, even what they were about, he replied, ‘The weasel under the cocktail cabinet.’