Who was Joe Orton: the 'fresh voice in British theatre' in the 1960s who hailed from Leicester

Stars such as Sir Ian McKellen, Stephen Fry, and Alec Baldwin are campaigning to have a statue erected of playwright Joe Orton in his hometown of Leicester.

But who was Joe Orton?

He grew up on a council-estate in Leicester, and it was a scholarship to RADA that started his journey toward the West End.

It was there that he met Kenneth Halliwell, an actor and writer who became his friend, mentor, lover, and ultimately, his murderer in 1967.

Orton and Halliwell lived in a bedsit and tried to form a writing partnership but with little success.

They both even went to prison for six months for theft and malicious damage due to their pastime of altering the front cover of books at their local library. Changing them to harsh collages and sometimes malicious texts, they would then hide and watch people's reactions as they discovered them.

Dr Emma Parker, an academic said that "He was a completely new voice in the 1960s, a really fresh voice in British theatre, and he was a working-class gay writer."

A campaign to raise the estimated £100,000 for Joe Orton's statue is currently live, as of 25 July. The video below highlights more about Joe Orton, his life, and his importance.