What the Butler Saw
by Joe Orton
State Theatre Company
Playhouse
Joe Orton’s plays are not everybody’s cup of tee hee. There is humour that confirms our sense of the world and there is humour which unsettles it and Orton is definitely the latter. His comedy, all elliptical word play and glassy epigrams, has the mannered artificiality of Wilde. But unlike Oscar, Orton is not endearing. His is pitiless, unlikeable comedy and when he makes you laugh it often sticks in your throat.
Like the conventional farces it satirises, What the Butler Saw is a peepshow of intrigues and peccadilloes which begins when the psychiatrist Dr Prentice attempts to seduce his newly-arrived temp. Complications spiral and so does Orton’s scorn for the euphemism and hypocrisy surrounding sex. I’m a married man protests the embattled Dr Prentice- `marriage excuses no-one the freaks’ roll-call’ is Orton’s reply.
After tentative opening scenes Simon Phillips’ production of What the Butler Saw gives Orton’s black farce the momentum it needs to succeed. It is a play of its time and while its cynicism about psychiatry, the law and, what President Bush likes to call family values, is currently apposite, Orton reveals an unconsidered misogyny that mars the satire. These days a rape joke is a contradiction in terms. There is a difference between uncomfortable truth and uncomfortable ignorance.
Having said that, Phillips has given the play considerable verve. Richard Roberts’ smoothly serviceable set, with three doors and a runway through the auditorium, is deadpan naturalism except for the crest above the proscenium proclaiming Vidi, vici, veni. Ian McDonald’s wry overture unsettled patrons with an ambiguous serve of the national anthem (theirs not ours) and the actors set about the task of delivering Orton’s sometimes tortuous text.
As Prentice, Richard Piper anchors the comedy with admirable restraint enabling Frank Whitten opportunities for extravagance as the sinister authoritarian Rance. Inventive and bizarre, Whitten could have been creepier but it is memorable work all the same. Celia de Burgh is splendid as Mrs Prentice, taking the play to the edge of entropy required to make it spin. It is a key performance. Philip Holder is more than a match for the Sergeant, Orton’s revenge on the constabulary and a triumph of farce. Jeanette Miller and Ryder Grindle as the gender-bending, frequently unclad Barclay and Beckett, are valiant in the chase scenes but lack vitality overall and their cockney aitches are hexcruciating.
It is in the second act that the both the play and the production hit their straps. Phillips brings the final scenes of manic activity to the pitch needed for the play to transcend its Benny Hill associations. The final tableau of the players ascending from their chaos (transfused with scarlet light by Krystof Kozlowski) is rich and exuberant. With What the Butler Saw the State Theatre Company has brought Orton’s ferocious comedy provocatively to life.
The Australian, August 9, 1992.