Joe Orton - satirist, playwright and 60s star - had, at best, an ambivalent relationship with Leicester, the city of his birth.
He famously described himself as 'coming from the gutter', while both his biographer, John Lahr, and Nick Gordon, the curator of this exhibition, touch on how stultifying he found life in a place with the motto 'semper eadem' (always the same).
Leicester was a prosperous and expanding city in the 50s, yet Lahr notes 'in the authorised history of the county, it is mentioned proudly that Leicester was marked by the absence of any extreme or distinctive movement in politics, religion or culture'.
Yet it is a city with which Orton will be for ever associated, partly because no matter how long he lived in London, newspaper reviewers always referred to him as the 'Leicester playwright'.
Whether this was code for 'working class' or 'faintly exotic', it certainly suggested 'not one of us' - heterosexual, middle class and Oxbridge. And in every way, Orton wasn't.
Careful not to lose his Leicester accent, barely concealing his promiscuous homosexuality at a time when gay sex was illegal, alternatively charming and biting, Orton cut a swathe through 60s London.
By 1967, he could revisit his home town and family, a triumph: aged only 33, he was the writer of four acclaimed and controversial plays, the script for a Beatles film and an increasingly famous face in the first youth culture revolution.
Forty years after his death, it is no surprise that Leicester's principal museum wanted to mount an exhibition about one of its most famous sons.
The exhibition opens with a massive, blown-up panel of the famous 60s photograph of Orton standing on the steps of 25 Noel Road in London's Islington. It was his home, with his partner Kenneth Halliwell, for most of his adult life, from 1959 until 1967.
The tiny flat was also where he died: on 9 August 1967, Halliwell battered him to death, then committed suicide with an overdose of Nembutal.
His relationship with and murder by Halliwell is just one of the challenges faced by the museum: how to tell an author's personal story without it overshadowing the work, how to deal with work that is time-based and theatrical, and how to cope with Orton's frankness about sex and his pointed swearing.
How do you bring someone who was lewd but not crude, and a little dangerous to know, to life in an antiseptic gallery setting? And how to do all this on a budget of just £5,000? The answer is that, of course, you can't.
Faced with a sum that precludes audio and video and rights clearance to recorded material (a real pity when making an exhibition about someone whose principal works are time-based), the museum has opted for a classic text-and-photo panel display, just about lifted from being a 'book on a wall' with a selection of objects, letters and other pieces of paper.
Many of the pieces have not been seen before, and much has been drawn from the Joe Orton archive acquired by Leicester University in 1997. But, as the Theatre Museum in London so cogently demonstrated, it is difficult to capture the spirit of a performance with a poster or handbill.
So given that the text has to do a lot, it is a fortunate it is written with verve. The exhibition is divided into chronological sections, starting with his difficult family upbringing in Leicester, then progressing to his ultimately unsuccessful acting years at Rada in the early 50s, and his pivotal relationship with fellow actor-turned-author Halliwell.
Much of the exhibition is taken up with the growing tension between the two, as the younger Orton gradually overtook his one-time mentor and started to reap the benefits of growing fame and fortune.
While it is hard to avoid Lahr - author of Orton's biography Prick Up Your Ears, and editor of his letter and diaries - the labels have an individual authorial voice and turn of phrase.
In 1967, Orton was asked to write a script for a Beatles film. Given by now Orton's aim was to 'vibrate the structure [of society]' and 'corrupt his audience through pleasure', it is perhaps no surprise that he went a further than the Fab Four had anticipated.
'No reason for the rejection was given,' the label notes. 'Perhaps because their characters were adulterous, cross-dressing murderers might have had something to do with it.'
While the objects are sparse (and were probably hard to source), some are truly memorable, such as his typewriter and fur coat. But far more interesting are the defaced book covers he and Halliwell created courtesy of Islington library in the early 60s.
In a subtle, vicious and funny campaign against the intellectual poverty of the material in the library - a comment that has a familiar ring today - Orton and Halliwell created replacement collage book jackets with some unorthodox inside blurbs. These are the stars of the show, rarely seen and now far more valuable than the insipid works they decorated.
Orton and Halliwell were sent to different prisons for six months. (Orton notes the fact that they were recognised as 'queer' probably had a lot to do with the harshness of the sentence.) It was during this time, though, that Orton found a voice separate to Halliwell's, and a focus for the black humour of his first hit, Entertaining Mr Sloane.
Today, there is a commemorative plaque on the Noel Road flat and periodical flurries of interest in Orton still result in pilgrims - an effect most marked in 1987, when Stephen Frear's memorable biopic (also called Prick Up Your Ears) revived fascination in Orton almost overnight.
But a bit like Noel Road, you need to have seen the film or films of the plays, or read the diaries to really get the vitality (and sheer nonchalant rudeness of the man) that this exhibition can unfortunately only allude to.
Jane Morris is an arts writer and editor
Project data
Cost: £5,000
Main funders: Leicester City Council
Curator: Nick Gordon
Exhibition design: In-house
Exhibition ends: 7 May
He famously described himself as 'coming from the gutter', while both his biographer, John Lahr, and Nick Gordon, the curator of this exhibition, touch on how stultifying he found life in a place with the motto 'semper eadem' (always the same).
Leicester was a prosperous and expanding city in the 50s, yet Lahr notes 'in the authorised history of the county, it is mentioned proudly that Leicester was marked by the absence of any extreme or distinctive movement in politics, religion or culture'.
Yet it is a city with which Orton will be for ever associated, partly because no matter how long he lived in London, newspaper reviewers always referred to him as the 'Leicester playwright'.
Whether this was code for 'working class' or 'faintly exotic', it certainly suggested 'not one of us' - heterosexual, middle class and Oxbridge. And in every way, Orton wasn't.
Careful not to lose his Leicester accent, barely concealing his promiscuous homosexuality at a time when gay sex was illegal, alternatively charming and biting, Orton cut a swathe through 60s London.
By 1967, he could revisit his home town and family, a triumph: aged only 33, he was the writer of four acclaimed and controversial plays, the script for a Beatles film and an increasingly famous face in the first youth culture revolution.
Forty years after his death, it is no surprise that Leicester's principal museum wanted to mount an exhibition about one of its most famous sons.
The exhibition opens with a massive, blown-up panel of the famous 60s photograph of Orton standing on the steps of 25 Noel Road in London's Islington. It was his home, with his partner Kenneth Halliwell, for most of his adult life, from 1959 until 1967.
The tiny flat was also where he died: on 9 August 1967, Halliwell battered him to death, then committed suicide with an overdose of Nembutal.
His relationship with and murder by Halliwell is just one of the challenges faced by the museum: how to tell an author's personal story without it overshadowing the work, how to deal with work that is time-based and theatrical, and how to cope with Orton's frankness about sex and his pointed swearing.
How do you bring someone who was lewd but not crude, and a little dangerous to know, to life in an antiseptic gallery setting? And how to do all this on a budget of just £5,000? The answer is that, of course, you can't.
Faced with a sum that precludes audio and video and rights clearance to recorded material (a real pity when making an exhibition about someone whose principal works are time-based), the museum has opted for a classic text-and-photo panel display, just about lifted from being a 'book on a wall' with a selection of objects, letters and other pieces of paper.
Many of the pieces have not been seen before, and much has been drawn from the Joe Orton archive acquired by Leicester University in 1997. But, as the Theatre Museum in London so cogently demonstrated, it is difficult to capture the spirit of a performance with a poster or handbill.
So given that the text has to do a lot, it is a fortunate it is written with verve. The exhibition is divided into chronological sections, starting with his difficult family upbringing in Leicester, then progressing to his ultimately unsuccessful acting years at Rada in the early 50s, and his pivotal relationship with fellow actor-turned-author Halliwell.
Much of the exhibition is taken up with the growing tension between the two, as the younger Orton gradually overtook his one-time mentor and started to reap the benefits of growing fame and fortune.
While it is hard to avoid Lahr - author of Orton's biography Prick Up Your Ears, and editor of his letter and diaries - the labels have an individual authorial voice and turn of phrase.
In 1967, Orton was asked to write a script for a Beatles film. Given by now Orton's aim was to 'vibrate the structure [of society]' and 'corrupt his audience through pleasure', it is perhaps no surprise that he went a further than the Fab Four had anticipated.
'No reason for the rejection was given,' the label notes. 'Perhaps because their characters were adulterous, cross-dressing murderers might have had something to do with it.'
While the objects are sparse (and were probably hard to source), some are truly memorable, such as his typewriter and fur coat. But far more interesting are the defaced book covers he and Halliwell created courtesy of Islington library in the early 60s.
In a subtle, vicious and funny campaign against the intellectual poverty of the material in the library - a comment that has a familiar ring today - Orton and Halliwell created replacement collage book jackets with some unorthodox inside blurbs. These are the stars of the show, rarely seen and now far more valuable than the insipid works they decorated.
Orton and Halliwell were sent to different prisons for six months. (Orton notes the fact that they were recognised as 'queer' probably had a lot to do with the harshness of the sentence.) It was during this time, though, that Orton found a voice separate to Halliwell's, and a focus for the black humour of his first hit, Entertaining Mr Sloane.
Today, there is a commemorative plaque on the Noel Road flat and periodical flurries of interest in Orton still result in pilgrims - an effect most marked in 1987, when Stephen Frear's memorable biopic (also called Prick Up Your Ears) revived fascination in Orton almost overnight.
But a bit like Noel Road, you need to have seen the film or films of the plays, or read the diaries to really get the vitality (and sheer nonchalant rudeness of the man) that this exhibition can unfortunately only allude to.
Jane Morris is an arts writer and editor
Project data
Cost: £5,000
Main funders: Leicester City Council
Curator: Nick Gordon
Exhibition design: In-house
Exhibition ends: 7 May
