Chris Shepherd | Yours Faithfully, Edna Welthorpe, Mrs / 2017

goading piety

by Douglas Messerli

 

Chris Shepherd (writer, based on letters written by Joe Orton), Chris Shepherd (director) Yours Faithfully, Edna Welthorpe, Mrs / 2017 [5 minutes]

 

On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the tragic death of playwright Joe Orton (1933-1967), University of Leicester professor Emma Parker and filmmaker Chris Shepherd joined together for a project to honor the legendary gay figure.

     Early in Orton’s relationship with Kenneth Halliwell (his lover who later murdered him), they joined together for many amusing pranks and hoaxes, including surreptitiously removing books from public libraries and modifying the cover art or the blurbs before returning them. For example, they returned a volume of the poems of John Betjeman with a new dust jacket featuring a photo of a nearly naked, heavily tattooed, middle-aged man.

     Discovered and prosecuted they were found guilty for having damaged more than 70 books, they were sentenced to prison for six months in May 1962. They believed they received such a harsh sentence “because we were queers.”

     The prison experience, however, helped to free Orton creatively. As he put it: “"It affected my attitude towards society. Before I had been vaguely conscious of something rotten somewhere, prison crystallised this. The old whore society really lifted up her skirts and the stench was pretty foul.... Being in the nick brought detachment to my writing. I wasn't involved any more. And suddenly it worked." Today, the Islington Local History Centre has several of the books’ covers, proudly displaying them in their collection.

      Also, much in a British tradition continued today by gay comedian Joe Lycett, Orton created a persona, Edna Welthorpe (Mrs), often portrayed as an elderly theater snob who wrote letters of outrage to the newspapers about Orton’s plays, helping to promote them. Named as an allusion to Terence Rattigan’s archetypal playgoer, Aunt Edna, Mrs. Welthorpe also wrote various letters to traditional and more adventuresome businesses, two of the satiric epistles appearing at the center of Shepherd’s animated film based on their content.

     The first of these letters written to Smedley Jams praises one of their products while damning another, mocking its contents and wondering what certain of its listed ingredients might actually be. The company writes an extremely apologetic letter, distressed for her viewpoints, returning her money and promising to look further in to the matter.

      The second, however, addressed to the Littlewood home catalogue service is far more comic.

     Edna Welthorpe writes the Littlewood company about a catalogue Orton must surely have requested containing pictures and ordering information about numerous gay, mostly S&M accoutrements from leather uniforms, jockstraps, and other paraphernalia including various vibrators and other sex toys. She claims that she not only did not order the catalogue but might be embarrassed by taking such a catalogue to her weekly card games with friends, etc. without one ever referring to the catalogue’s contents or images.

       This time a telephone call follows suggesting that the company acted in good faith, having received such a request, and will go out of their way to prosecute anyone who may have involved in requesting the catalogue be shipped to her address.

        Shepherd’s quickly shifting animations, reminding one of the cartoons of the 1960s, influenced by pop art, moves from the frames of line production of the terrible pie filling about which she complains to a number of the imaginary and real S&M costumes the catalogue might have contained, along with hilariously appropriate images of policemen and handcuffs, which function very nicely, of course, with the S&M world, just such figures the Littlewood company suggests as a way of resolving the crime of someone having misled them to deliver said catalogue to Edna Welthorpe (Mrs).

     In some respects, Shepherd’s short film is akin to the works of filmmaker Maria Losier, who also uses the work of others to repurpose her own cinematic vision such as The Passion of Joan of Arc (2002) (wherein she uses Dreyer’s filmed scenes in order to shift the narrative of Joan portrayed as transgender hero into a presentation of her as a heterosexual girl who as seen God naked, Losier herself performing the role of Joan) and in her Bird, Bath and Beyond (2003) wherein she employs gay filmmaker Mike Kuchar as a kind of comic emcee. Here, Shepherd’s uses Orton’s satiric epistles in order to create his animated images, not all of which are hinted at in Edna Welthorpe's letters.

     The film was screened and the letters were read at the Latitude Festival and at a special event at The Little Theatre, Leicester, on August 9, 2017.

 

Los Angeles, November 18, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2022).