“The only brickbat that angered Orton was the grudging praise of his plays as ‘commercial’ from John Russell Taylor in his introduction to the play [Entertaining Mr. Sloane] in Penguin’s New English Dramatists 8. ‘Living theatre needs good commercial dramatists as much as the original artist,’ Taylor wrote. Orton was furious at such critical stupidity. ‘Are they different, then?’ he asked, quoting John Russell Taylor’s distinction between commercial success and art to his agent and asking to withdraw the play from the volume. ‘Hamlet was written by a commercial dramatist. So were Volpone and The School for Scandal and The Importance of Being Earnest and The Cherry Orchard and Our Betters. Two ex-commercial successes of the last thirty years are about to be revived by our non-commercial theatre: A Cuckoo in the Nest and Hay Fever, but if my plays go on in the West End, I don’t expect this to be used as a sneer by people who judge artistic success by commercial failure. There is no intrinsic merit in a flop.'”
John Lahr, introduction to Joe Orton: The Complete Plays