Escape from Happiness

Ian C. Nelson is Assistant Director of Libraries, University of
Saskatchewan; and Director, Saskatoon Gateway Plays, Regina Summer
Stage, and La Troupe du Jour.

If you were in despair that Joe Orton is dead and has left behind a
finite number of works, despair no more. Orton’s spirit seems to have
found new lead in the pencil of Canadian playwright George F. Walker.
Escape from Happiness—another of his East End locale plays—is
nothing less that Loot revisited. It is hilarious. Generous helpings of
criminal activity, violence, and family solidarity are all subjected to
the microscopic attention of the unassailable but skewed logic of
psychiatric theory and police investigative deduction, each applied with
ferocity and conviction in the classic farce mode. Orton lives, thanks
to George F. Walker!