Live with It

Ian C. Nelson is assistant director of libraries at the University of
Saskatchewan and président, La Troupe du Jour, Regina Summer Stage.

This dramatic biography of playwright Joe Orton and his companion
Kenneth Halliwell is quite worthy of the outrageousness that marked
Orton’s life and his brand of black, convention-defying humor. The two
characters are alternately in a state of frustratingly ambiguous undress
or literally handcuffed to one another throughout the play. The words
and the mimetic action are thick with the foreshadowing of their fateful
ends: Halliwell bludgeons Orton to death with a hammer and then himself
commits suicide.

Moore undoubtedly made use of Orton’s published diaries, but what is
totally remarkable is that a 19-year-old Winnipeg high-school girl has
so thoroughly absorbed Orton’s particularly graphic and biting
homosexual wit and British speech patterns. Live with It premiered at
Winnipeg’s Theatre Projects in February 1994.