Victim Of Murderous Envy

Kenneth Cranham was Joe Orton’s favourite actor. He saw the writer courted by the Beatles, as his plays flourished on stage and screen – while Orton’s boyfriend, maddened by failure, descended into a green-eyed rage.

It was all thanks to the radio that I ever got to meet Joe Orton and appear in his plays.Because he and Kenneth Halliwell – his lover, who murdered Orton, aged only 34, on 9th August 1967, half a century ago – were so hard up, they listened to the radio a lot. That’s why Joe heard my radio debut – in Boy Dudgeon, a play written by Ray Jenkins, head of drama at my old school, Tulse Hill Comprehensive.

Tulse Hill, in Lambeth, south London, may not be very glamorous. Noël Coward once said of a performance by Margaret Lockwood that ‘she had all the chic of a whist drive in Tulse Hill’. As for Tulse Hill Comprehensive – eight storeys high, with more than 2,000 pupils – well, one alumnus, Ken Livingstone, said, ‘If you can survive Tulse Hill School, you can survive anything.’

Still, it had this extraordinary drama department. I played the Earl of Westmoreland in Henry IV, Part 2, and the title role in Macbeth. After a girl from the nearby Dick Sheppard School got pregnant in one of our joint plays, all the women were played by boys. I remember my Lady Macbeth hitching his skirts up to play football.

Inspired by the Royal Court Theatre in Chelsea, then in its heyday, we acted in all sorts of productions at school. I did an Ionesco play, a Dorothy L Sayers play, an updated Molière and a new play by John Mortimer.

And I appeared in that Ray Jenkins two-hander, Boy Dudgeon, shortly after I left Tulse Hill in 1963, when I was 18. It was the turning point of my life. At that point, I’d failed once to get into RADA, and I’d been kicked out of the New College of Speech and Drama, a teacher training college.