John Lahr’s successful dramatisation of The Orton Diaries that chronicles the last eight months of Joe Orton’s life his growing theatrical celebrity and the corresponding punishing effect it had on his relationship with his friend and mentor Kenneth Halliwell who murdered him on August 9 1967 and then took his own life.

Diary of a Somebody was first premiered in a one-act version at the National Theatre in 1986. The play was subsequently produced in this full-length version in 1987 at the King’s Head Theatre. This will be its first revival in London in 35 years. The play incorporates into the collage of Orton’s words, his letters, literary fragments, psychiatric reports and Lahr’s unused taped material from sources for his biography of Orton, Prick Up Your Ears.