Prick Up Your Ears is a 1987 British film, directed by Stephen Frears, about the playwright Joe Orton and his lover Kenneth Halliwell.

The film stars Gary Oldman as Orton, Alfred Molina as Halliwell, Wallace Shawn as Lahr, and Vanessa Redgrave as Peggy Ramsay.

Literary agent Peggy Ramsay knocks on the door of playwright Joe Orton and his lover Kenneth Halliwell, but nobody opens.

They fell into a parody of a traditional married couple, with Orton as the "husband" and Halliwell as the long-suffering and increasingly-ignored "wife" (a situation exacerbated at a time when being a sexually active homosexual was illegal).

[7] Variety noted: "The script is witty, the direction fluid, with one of the homosexual orgy scenes in a public toilet almost balletic, and the depiction of the lovers' life in their flat suitably claustrophobic.

[9] Similarly, Pauline Kael lauded Redgrave but said the male relationship was unconvincing and suffused with "modern-style psychosexual moralizing", and that "unlike Orton, it [the script] takes no real delight in misbehaving.