Minutes before the show was due to begin, a flustered woman emerged from one of these doors exclaiming angrily that there were “men pissing in front of everyone”. Given that the show we were about to watch was Diary of a Somebody, John Lahr’s 1986 adaptation of Joe Orton’s diaries, I couldn’t help but wonder who Orton’s targets might be in the context today’s eternally baffling culture wars. Would it be the kind of woman who was clearly upset at having to wash her hands in full view of male genitalia, or would it be the authorities at the theatre who expect her to do so and would presumably brand her a “transphobe” or a “bigot” should she complain?

This revival of Diary of a Somebody includes a running joke delivered by Mrs Edna Welthorpe, an alter-ego of Orton who would write to the press and to theatres in the late Sixties to complain about his plays. She emerges from time to time at a window on the upstage wall, a kind of choric figure expostulating on the evils of our hero. Her words are lifted verbatim from the letters that Orton dispatched under her name. For instance, her letter to the Telegraph described Entertaining Mr Sloane (1964) as an “endless parade of mental and physical perversion”.

Such satire feels more relevant than ever when one considers how the new puritans of “Critical Social Justice” often give the impression of emulating Mrs Edna Welthorpe, with all their talk of how libraries ought to be “decolonised”, their pruning of supposedly offensive comedy shows on streaming services, and their attacks on “problematic” representations in art and literature. In this, Orton had an advantage over the satirists of our time. While he was lauded for lampooning the establishment and breaking taboos, writers who do so today are likely to be chastised by critics and the doyens of the industry for failing to toe the line.

Consider the responses to the West End revival of Jez Butterworth’s award-winning Jerusalem. “Should the play be revived?” writes playwright Bea Roberts. “I’m not sure. I read the script again recently and there’s a lot that feels dated: the laddish chat about ‘birds’ and the racial references… I understand it’s a safe bet for producers, this big, much-loved hit — and I loved it too. But at a time when theatre is grappling with questions of diversity and representation after Black Lives Matter, and when we’re seeing the rise of nationalism post-Brexit, doing a play about defending the homeland and Englishness seems ill-judged.”

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Roberts is far from alone in her belief that it is the responsibility of the dramatist to reinforce voguish and ephemeral trends. It seems unlikely that a work as genuinely subversive as Orton’s What the Butler Saw (1967) would ever be commissioned by a major theatre in the current climate. Early drafts would require a thorough going-over by a “sensitivity reader”, and doubtless a director with concerns about how theatrical productions ought to send the “correct message” would mangle whatever glimmers of genius remained.

I’m exaggerating, but only slightly. I have spoken to actors who have found that valuable rehearsal time is often now occupied with interrogating the morality behind the texts, and how the first session begins with each cast member declaring their preferred pronouns. Many avid theatregoers have been turned off because so many productions feel more like sermons than works of art. Critics in the mainstream press are now regularly assessing drama on the putative “message” of the piece, or whether or not they approve of the way in which characters are represented. The star-rating system has always been fatuous, but is especially so if marks are docked for insufficiently diverse casting.

None of which appeared to bother the best critics of Orton’s day. That his appeal has endured is, of course, partly due to the mystery surrounding his gruesome death, the event that Lahr’s play steers us towards with the inevitability of a Greek tragedy. In 1967, Orton was beaten to death with a hammer by his lover and mentor Kenneth Halliwell in their small Islington flat. In his suicide note, Halliwell wrote: “If you read his diary all will be explained. KH. P.S. Especially the latter part.” Yet the final pages were missing.

Some believe that Orton’s agent Peggy Ramsay took the diary from the murder scene and may have removed the final section, possibly to protect someone’s identity. Friends of Orton have testified that he was having an affair and was on the brink of leaving Halliwell, but the man in question has never been named. The theatre critic Michael Thornton was informed by police that he was mentioned in those final pages, and that they had been withheld because they “contained sensitive information about persons still living”. If true, this would scupper the theory that Ramsay censored the document, and would suggest that the solution lies buried in police archives.

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Nico Rao Pimparé’s excellent production does not linger over the death itself, or indulge in a crude re-enactment (this was the major failing of Simon Bent’s 2009 biographical play Prick Up Your Ears at the Comedy Theatre in London). Rather, we are left with the image of Orton as he was in life; a puckish and defiant figure who revelled in the joys of his own sexuality. There is no deus ex machina of the kind we remember from What the Butler Saw, no figure from the heavens descending in a great blaze of glory to provide a satisfactory resolution. The final entry in Orton’s diary ends abruptly, cut off mid-sentence; so too the story of his life.

It was his promiscuity that may have been the catalyst to Halliwell’s mania. Orton would leave his diary around the flat in the knowledge that his lover would read his accounts of sexual exploits with strangers. This is also why its reliability cannot be trusted. Orton wrote these entries knowing that they would one day be published, and nothing satisfied him more than exasperating the prigs and pearl-clutchers of his day. As he noted when revising What the Butler Saw, “sex is the only way to infuriate them. Much more fucking and they’ll be screaming hysterics in next to no time.”

It was arguably Orton’s time in prison that consolidated this desire to provoke, and that appears to have been the driving motivation in both his life and his work. Orton and Halliwell served six months for defacing books at Islington Library. The pair would add semi-pornographic images to dustjackets, or rewrite the blurbs in the hope of shocking unsuspecting readers. He later claimed that prison “crystallised” his sense of “something rotten somewhere”, and that “the old whore society really lifted up her skirts and the stench was pretty foul”.

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While comedy tends to fare badly with the passage of time, relatively recent productions of Orton’s farces have proven hugely successful. The 50th anniversary production of Loot at the Park Theatre in 2017 was one of the best I have seen, and was enhanced immeasurably by a live actor playing the corpse that is stripped naked and bundled about the stage in the escalating mania. It was quite the contrast to the 2012 production of What the Butler Saw at the Vaudeville Theatre, whose fatal misstep was to allow the characters to find their own lines funny. If Orton’s farces aren’t played straight, they simply don’t work.

There are no likeable characters in What the Butler Saw; Orton sees humanity as a parade of degraded creatures, slaves to baser instincts, whose only value rests in being figures of fun for us to pruriently observe. The title invites us to imagine a butler taking a moment from his duties to peer into one of those seaside peepshow machines, popular in Edwardian England. This is what his “betters” get up to behind closed doors. Through his treatment of themes such as police brutality, institutionalised abuse, incest and necrophilia, Orton strips away the patina of respectable society. Whether one finds this cynical or not, it is undeniably funny.

True to the golden rule of comedy, revivals of Orton’s plays are all about the timing. And now that the theatre industry appears to be so ideologically captured, what better time for writers to pick up where Orton left off? In his day, the Lord Chamberlain would ensure that potentially subversive material would not make it to the stage. Today, theatrical practitioners have taken on that role for themselves, embodying the kind of prissy moralisers that Orton took such pleasure in skewering. Mrs Edna Welthorpe is back — and it won’t be long before her skirt gets lifted.

A spokesperson for the Prime Minister echoed her response, saying that he is looking into “toughening measures for social media and streaming platforms which don’t tackle harmful content on their platforms”. SNP Councillor Julie McKenzie has called for Carr to be “prosecuted” along with “his applauding audience”. Liam Evans, it seems, was simply ahead of his time.

The key difference is that Liam Evans does not exist. The article was a hoax, intended to draw attention to the ideological drift of the mainstream media. (For those who are interested, if you take the fourth letter of every sentence in the article the true author is revealed.)

But the success of the hoax raised a number of questions. How is it that a national media organisation would publish such absurd and authoritarian drivel by a complete unknown? Are their editorial standards really so low? And does their decision to publish the article suggest that they support the author’s calls for comedy to be regulated by the state? If so, Liam Evans was simply a useful tool, someone the Independent could promote who was prepared to say the quiet part out loud.

There has always been satirical potential in hoaxing. In the Sixties, for instance, a series of letters was dispatched to the press by Mrs Edna Welthorpe, who was enraged by the depravity of Joe Orton’s farces, which were dominating the West End. Of Entertaining Mr Sloane, Welthorpe wrote: “I myself was nauseated by this endless parade of mental and physical perversion. And to be told that such a disgusting piece of filth now passes for humour!”

When an audience member wrote a letter of complaint to the Criterion Theatre about Orton’s Loot, Welthorpe responded directly, claiming that she was an employee and that the letter had been passed to her for filing. “Please, please, as a fellow Christian, let me applaud your design in writing to the Lord Chamberlain,” she wrote. “This truly horrible play shouldn’t contaminate our streets.”

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That Orton should assume a persona to fulminate against his own plays was simply his way of broadening the scope of his satirical work from the stage to the real world. He was obsessed with the sham gentility of a society that was, to his mind, essentially rotten. Orton loved to shock, perhaps because he was seemingly incapable of being shocked by anything. In his plays, he was able to take a hacksaw to those figures of authority he so despised, be they doctors, police officers, or any other breed of moralising hypocrite. But the hoax letters served a different purpose. They mocked their targets through the pretence of sympathy, effectively encouraging more of the kind of behaviour that his farces sought to lampoon.

This technique is the precursor to what we now call “trolling”. The term is often misused as a synonym for malicious and bullying online behaviour but, as traditionally understood, trolling is the art of coaxing people into a reaction. Motivations vary from troll to troll. For some, it is simply a matter of revelling in the gullibility of strangers. For others, the intention is to expose the vices and shortcomings of those in power.

Jonathan Swift was an early exponent of this kind of trolling in the creation of his alter-ego Isaac Bickerstaff, who wrote pamphlets which predicted, and then announced, the death of the astrologer John Partridge. Swift resented Partridge because of his attacks on the church, and must have been immensely gratified that Bickerstaff’s announcement had been taken on trust by so many. It is said that Partridge was thereafter continually having to fend off queries about his uncanny resemblance to a dead man.

Of course, many hoaxers are driven purely by self-interest. When, in 1806, Mary Bateman used concentrated vinegar to write “Christ is coming” onto her chicken’s eggs, and then charged members of the community to visit her “Prophet Hen of Leeds”, it is unlikely that she intended to make any kind of satirical point.

Yet one might argue that even in hoaxes of this kind there is some societal insight to be gleaned, however inadvertently. Mary Toft managed to destroy the reputations of a number of prominent surgeons who, in 1726, believed that she had given birth to rabbits. One of the king’s doctors, Nathaniel St. André, was so convinced that he published A Short Narrative of an Extraordinary Delivery of Rabbets. Soon after, William Hogarth produced his Cunicularii, which depicts Mary Toft in labour, surrounded by learned men of the medical profession, while multiple rabbits roam at their feet. If Toft was no satirist, she at least inspired some of the best of her age.

Perhaps the most celebrated instance of satirical hoaxing in our lifetime was Chris Morris’s television series Brass Eye (1997), which took aim at celebrity and media culture by inviting public figures to join campaigns against entirely fabricated social justice causes. In one episode, Bernard Manning, Rolf Harris and Noel Edmonds were enlisted to warn against the dangers of “cake”, a fictitious drug that, as Manning dutifully informed viewers, caused one girl to vomit out her own pelvis.

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In another episode, Nick Owen expounded on the dangers of “heavy electricity” which, due to the effect of “sodomised electrons” was “regularly flattening cattle in Sri Lanka”.  Then there was the radio DJ Neil Fox, who was tricked into making this astonishing claim: “Genetically, paedophiles have more genes in common with crabs than they do with you and me. Now, that is scientific fact. There’s no real evidence for it, but it is scientific fact.”

Many of those duped by Morris were seemingly happy to read aloud any hogwash from an autocue in return for television exposure and the impression that they were on the right side of history. Such hoaxes could potentially be even more effective in today’s climate, with so many soft-witted celebrities eager to endorse fashionable but illiberal notions they barely understand. All major political, educational, artistic and corporate bodies are seemingly in submission to a new identity-obsessed religion of “social justice” that couches its regressive ideas in progressive terminology.

But, unlike the days of Brass Eye, the jesters are now in lockstep with these establishment lines, and so the most pertinent sources for satire are generally left untapped. They are, as Morris recently put it, more interested in “doing some kind of exotic display for the court” than exposing the follies of the powerful.

It is perhaps inevitable, then, that one of the most impressive hoaxes of recent years has come from outside the comedy industry. In October 2018, it was revealed that Peter Boghossian, James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose had spent a year writing and submitting bogus academic papers to various journals in order to show how certain branches of the humanities were now routinely prioritising ideological goals over the pursuit of truth and knowledge. By the time the hoax was exposed, seven of their 20 articles had been accepted for publication, and a further seven were in the process of review.

As a work of satire, this project was an undoubted success. It provided evidence of what many had long suspected, that nonsensical ideas could thrive within the academy so long as they were camouflaged in vogueish jargon. One paper purported to be a study of the sexual activity of dogs in urban parks, and used this phoney data to draw conclusions about contemporary “rape culture”. Another argued that white male students ought to be chained to the floor during lessons as a form of reparation for slavery. Most audacious of all was the article based entirely on a chapter of Mein Kampf, rewritten in the language of intersectional feminist theory.

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That all of these articles were accepted for publication in peer-reviewed journals should have alerted academics to a troubling strain of corruption and fraudulence in their field. They should have resolved to rectify the problem, but instead chose to demonise and smear the hoaxers who had exposed it. When satirists hit on uncomfortable truths, they are rarely thanked for their efforts.

It has become a truism that we are living during a period in which satire and reality are not easily distinguishable. Ten years ago, headlines such as “Can my children be friends with white people?” and “Transgender man gives birth to non-binary partner’s baby with female sperm donor” would have been dismissed as the fevered concoctions of Viz or the National Enquirer (they are, in fact, from the New York Times and the Mirror).

For all that, there are opportunities to be seized in such a climate of institutionalised asininity. While trust in figures of authority is plummeting, and people are no longer sure who or what can be believed, the conditions are ripe for a new generation of Joe Ortons and Mary Tofts to cause some necessary mischief. In an age of unreason, the hoaxer can thrive.

To make a filthy joke is the most obvious first reaction to hearing the news of the campaign to mount a statue of the playwright Joe Orton in his hometown of Leicester. The extremely rude and extremely funny playwright would surely do the same.

But then what? Would he really want such an accolade? You can understand the public interest: Orton’s sudden rise to theatrical fame in 1964 with the plays Entertaining Mr Sloane and Loot, and his sudden death at the hands of his lover, Kenneth Halliwell, just three years later, will continue to fascinate for as long as celebrity, bad taste and death continue to fascinate human beings. His diaries are a candid chronicle of that outrageous life. In fact, his true-life story and its grisly denouement have rather blotted out the plays themselves. (There are only three full-length ones – Sloane was followed by Loot in 1966 and the third, What the Butler Saw, was produced posthumously.)

More famous, arguably, is the 1987 biopic, Prick Up Your Ears, by Alan Bennett and Stephen Frears starring Gary Oldman, which cemented the public image of Orton into the cultural consciousness – a prodigiously promiscuous homosexual and brilliant writer of black comedies who came to a sad end because of jealousy both sexual and professional. So perhaps, then, since the mores of British society have shifted so much since 1967 – Orton was murdered mere days after male homosexuality was made legal –  it’s appropriate he should receive this statuary immorality, as much a reminder of that precocious talent as of righted wrongs.

But I’m still not entirely convinced. I think Orton’s work, which sadly exists under the shadow of his life and death, is as much in opposition to the values of today as it was to the values of the 1960s. And we are in danger of smoothing away the jagged edges of his genius. There are broken bottles in there.

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There is something admirable in campaigning for the civic commemoration of a person whose entire schtick is a condemnation of civic society, who was sent to prison for the systematic defacing of library books, and whose final play ends with the penis from an exploded statue of Churchill being held aloft. Viewed in this light it could almost be seen as what is now known as an “epic troll”. Orton the work – if not Orton the man – is all about mocking the sacred, knocking down the statues.

It’s hard to think of an institution or value that Orton doesn’t punch at in his plays. The work ethic, the war, religion in general and Roman Catholicism in particular, the police. The plays are all about the humour to be found in people hiding venal and carnal motives behind respectability – the observant Catholic nurse repeatedly marrying old men for their money following the convenient deaths of their wives, the respectable middle-aged brother and sister who are prepared to overlook the brutal murder of their father in favour of a sexual time-share of his murderer, the policeman who uses the excuse of shining British justice to rough up young men for his own gratification.

There is a still-astonishing lack of compassion and empathy in his work – in fact, that lack may be even more deeply felt by modern audiences. There is explicitly no advocacy for social change. Orton is an uproarious laugh at people and things as they are, with no plan – no hope – for what they should be. All attempts to improve humanity, from prayer to psychoanalysis, are portrayed as humbuggish fronts for people getting what they can for themselves.

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In some of these areas he was not unique for his time; his work fits in with the swell of questioning authority that took place in the Sixties in the theatre and beyond. What makes Orton different from his peers, though, is that he also took shots at things that we still hold to be sacrosanct today, some perhaps even more than in his time: consent, the age of consent, sensitivities about race.

In What the Butler Saw alone, various female characters use the threat of false rape accusations; a barely legal hotel bellboy is enjoyed by the entire company and, offstage, is said to have pleasured a class of schoolgirls; “white golliwogs” are invoked to calm “colour prejudice hotspots”. This is a man who wrote in his diaries about sexual fantasies involving “mentally defective farm labourers”, and that’s one of the more palatable sexual digressions in its pages.

Perhaps the funniest clash between then and now is the claim made by some prominenti of the campaign that Orton was an ‘LGBT+ pioneer’, a ‘trailblazer’, who in that most ghastly word of our times, needs to be ‘celebrated’. Yet he is not a saintly Alan Turing, even less a cuddly cheeky Graham Norton.

It’s tempting to imagine what Orton would make of the modern LGBT movement if he were alive today. It has all the markings of an Orton target – blatant cant, automatically assumed virtue, and recourse to confected outrage when questioned. At the recent Pride event in London, there was a supportive flypast by the Red Arrows, which is possibly the most insanely, gloriously Ortonesque thing that has ever happened in the real world.

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The statue campaign also states that Orton was “the first person to put gay characters on stage”, but even this claim is a bit rum. The randy young men of the plays are all gleefully, mercenarily bisexual. The only exclusively homosexual character in Orton is Ed, the marvellously repressed “uncle” to Mr Sloane, who obsesses about young lads in tight shorts “keeping themselves clean” by doing plenty of strenuous physical exercise and avoiding getting into “trouble” with girls. His sexuality and its repression is something we are encouraged to laugh at. He is certainly not what we would consider a Stonewall role model or good ‘representation’.

This attempt to sanitise and defang Orton is saddening. If he were working today, his latest play would be about randy teenage boys robbing graves while disguised as transwomen in burqas. If there is to be a statue of the great man – and he was great – let it reflect his true, sometimes truly horrible, genius. He should be portrayed with a white golliwog in one hand and a prodigiously endowed 18-year-old in the other, to remind us of how we always need to be upset, and of how funny that can be.