Joe Orton

"With insanity, as with vomit, it is the passerby who receives the inconvenience."

"He became a pivotal figure, a crucial embodiment of the post-modernist impulse; by means of farce he gives expression to that conviction of a dislocated self, of a reified experience, of a brittle and contingent language, which still seems to define the nature of our private fears if not always of our public protestations."

"The Oscar Wilde of Welfare State gentility."

"Orton no longer seems to be merely a footnote in the history of modern drama but merits at least a significant chapter. His growing popularity must come as a surprise to many critics and reviewers, who thought of him as a slickly clever, commercial dramatist."

"Orton was outrageous and anarchistic... He has become a tradition."

"The piece [Entertaining Mr Sloane] is by a young master of artificial diction and ribaldry, a writer whom other writers recognized. Seán O'Casey said cheerfully to me that this was a play to make a man pull his trousers up."

"Gradually, Orton's terrible obsession with perversion, which is regarded as having brought his life to an end and choked his very high talent, poisons the atmosphere of the play [What the Butler Saw]. And what should have been a piece of gaily irresponsible nonsense becomes impregnated with evil."

"I think...it's a much more profound and serious play than Chips With Everything or Look Back in Anger. I think it will survive and tell people more about what it felt to be alive in the sixties than anything else of that period."

"What the Butler Saw will live to be accepted as a comedy classic of English literature."

"Orton, like Wilde, was a master of artificial diction and, unlike Wilde, a master craftsman as well."

"South Ruislip Mandarin."

"What Orton had to say about England and society had never been said before. The first thing it showed was a society diminished by telly-technology. Everybody expresses themselves as if they were brought up on television."