Melissa Blease reviews What the Butler Saw on at Theatre Royal Bath until Saturday 1 April
I developed a ‘thing’ about Joe Orton when I was around 12 years old. It was very much a pre-pubescent, existential crush, and I never met him – he died in 1967 aged just 34, bludgeoned to death by his lover, Kenneth Halliwell. If you don’t know (but would like to know) who, why and what Orton was all about, read his diaries or watch Stephen Frears’ 1987 film Prick Up Your Ears; both of those confirm, to me, why Orton has remained on my alternative hero charts even in my grown-up years.
It was an odd experience, then, to find myself watching Orton’s final play What the Butler Saw – a brand-new production, commemorating the 50th anniversary of his untimely demise – and wondering why it too had so competently fuelled my Orton obsession when I first saw it, 20 years ago.
Way before I first encountered it, back in 1969 (the play debuted two years after Orton’s death), What the Butler Saw caused ripples of controversy amongst even the most ‘progressive’ of the chattering classes. The play’s very title takes a pop at ‘conventional’ fnar-fnar farce before plunging into territory that includes incest, misogyny, homosexuality, sexual abuse, cross-dressing and mental illness, all being played for laughs.
On from that, even our Very British Institutions (the medical profession; Sir Winston Churchill; the police force) are exposed as out of touch, hypocrisy-ridden asylums apparently harbouring a psychotic, deranged shower of bedlamites. And a huge golden phallus is held aloft in the closing scenes… crikey!
Little wonder, then, that on the play’s opening night there were cries of “Filth!”, “Disgusting!” and even “Arrest them, now!” from the audience at the Queen’s Theatre, London. Almost five decades on, however – and perhaps rather ironically? – watching What the Butler Saw feels a little like sitting through Alan Ayckbourn’s Bedroom Farce after taking advantage of the sherry at a vicar’s tea party: more comfortably silly than discomfortingly subversive.
Jasper Britton as Dr Rance and Catherine Russell as Mrs Prentice. Credit: Catherine Ashmore
But this is, of course, a revival, so let’s put the time of writing into context here. Even at the end of the swinging sixties, few contemporary playwrights had the audacity to write a comedy that brings characters including a philandering pervert psychiatrist, a vulnerable secretary, a frustrated wife, a sinister, wholly unethical medical profession inspector and a seedy, exploitative hotel porter together in one ridiculous situation. Even fewer writers would then go on to take those characters on a journey that involves all manner of preposterous, unlikely shenanigans before doors are locked, pistols are drawn and most of the protaganists end up wearing either each other’s clothes or a straitjacket.
For such outright, brazen ridiculousness, I salute Orton. For the smatterings of elegant Wildean language hidden in the script (sadly all too often buried beneath inelegant, wild over-emoting in key scenes) and intelligent homage paid to Greek tragedy, Shakespearean comedy and good old pantomime hilarity in order to move the plot along, I congratulate him.
But for finding what was once a gloriously rebellious, anarchic drama now slightly dull by comparison to even the most prosaic of soap operas… for that I can only apologise, to both Orton and to my younger self.
But perhaps age has wearied me, in much the same way that time has wearied What the Butler Saw, which in 2017 represents a trip down memory lane to a time and a place we don’t necessarily need to revisit. I can’t help thinking it’s unfortunate, however, that Orton never had the luxury of presenting us with an updated version of what the butler might have seen today; despite my misgivings about this tour around what’s ostensibly a cultural museum piece, the man who wrote it will forever remain at the vanguard of British contemporary theatre.
Visit: theatreroyal.org.uk
Main image: Rufus Hound as Dr Prentice. Credit: Catherine Ashmore
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