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From Socialist Review, No. 185, April 1995, p. 27.
Copyright © Socialist Review.
Copied with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
What The Butler Saw
by Joe Orton
It could have been bad. The stalwarts of British TV sitcom, ancient (John Alderton from Please Sir!) and modern – Richard Wilson from the programme whose title overestimates its liveliness, One Foot in the Grave – lined up in a farce to pull the middle classes into the National Theatre. And all over by 10 p.m. in time for the train to Guildford.
But, with the pen in Joe Orton’s hand, the joke is on the middle classes. Orton was famously and flamboyantly gay in a time when it was still a jailable offence no matter how old you were. He wasn’t interested in the farce of the Brian Rix variety.
What the Butler Saw doesn’t even try to get a few chuckles out of mild innuendo about adultery. Orton’s out to get gales of laughter from transvestism, lesbianism, nymphomania and a few other things which it would do no good for potential audiences to find out about in a review.
The action takes place in a sanatorium where the doctor’s attempts to seduce an applicant for the post of his secretary, the calamitous state of his own marriage and the inconvenient arrival of a government inspector (by far the maddest of a barmy bunch) conspire to trigger the usual loss of sanity and outer garments.
In passing, quite a few establishment icons get demolished – Winston Churchill is revealed as, literally and metaphorically, a big prick, psychiatrists as crazed and/or sex maniacs, and policemen as crossdressers (well, actually, nearly everyone is a crossdresser in this play.)
Orton’s triumph is to take the almost moribund form of the farce and turn it into something which is progressive without being po-faced.
Orton’s intentions are most clearly signalled in his diaries:
‘26 March 1967. Easter Day. Nothing on television but uplifting programmes. BBC crooning to itself as usual ... Kenneth [Halliwell, Orton’s lover], who read the Observer, tells me of the latest way-out group in America – complete sexual licence. “Its the only way to smash the wretched civilisation,” I said, making a mental note to hot up What the Butler Saw. Sex is the only way to infuriate them. Much more fucking and they’ll be screaming hysterics.’
Now as a theory of revolution this may, as they say, leave something to be desired. Nevertheless, it produced a marvellously funny and subversive play, even if time and this production have taken out some of its bite.
Plays at the National Theatre, London.
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