Surely we’re all mad people, and they
Whom we think are, are not.

-The Revenger’s Tragedy

Is the world mad ?
I’m not paid to quarrel with accepted facts.

– Joe Orton

Joe Orton’s plays are disquietingly funny not because of their nihilism but because of their relentless logic. Few satirists are as unsparing of human behaviour and of human institutions. The lineage probably begins with Kafka. In The Trial, the authorities knock at the door of Josef K, arrest him and convict him for a crime that is never revealed -either to him or the reader. Writers such as Orton have continued to examine the dangerous absurdities of such power.

In Orton’s first stage success, Loot, Inspector Truscott enters a house posing as a representative of the water board:

“There was no excuse for a warrant. We had no proof. However, the water board doesn’t need a warrant to enter private houses. And so I availed myself of this loophole in the law. It’s for your own good that Authority behaves in this seemingly alarming way.”

The cheerful manner, the evasive language -a mix of platitude and officialese- and the recurrent insistence that it is all for one’s own good, these are the hallmarks of Orton’s comedy. In What the Butler Saw, Mrs Prentice chirps -“My room at the hotel was small, airless and uncomfortable. A model of its kind.” When Dr Rance arrives, Dr Prentice asks – “Do you cover asylums proper? Or just houses of tentative madness.”

Writing in the mid-Sixties, Orton is part of a more general push for change. The Macmillan government, rocked by the Profumo scandal and the Philby revelations, epitomised an Establishment where not only were fings not what they used to be but neither were they what they seemed to be. Authority, punitively represented by the Church, the Law and the Press, was revealed as being as perverse and lawless as those it hounded. Orton and his lover Kenneth Halliwell knew first hand about the harsh whims of the legal system when in 1962 they were both sentenced to six months imprisonment for defacing eighty-eight library books. Another prank which Orton perpetuated, this time without detection, was to write letters of mock outrage to newspapers and officialdom signing himself (Mrs) Edna Whelthorpe.

What the Butler Saw, Orton’s final play, continues his swipes against the hypocrisies of power, this time focussing on the presumptions of the medical profession in general and psychiatry in particular. The prescription of normality – especially in sexual matters – encourages Orton to greater and greater ribaldry. Echoing the suave satire and epigrammatic brilliance of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, Orton also incorporates the Oh Crikey confusions of those English theatrical institutions, the Aldwych farces. But where Wilde is forgiving and Ben Travers benign, Orton’s comedy is violent, disturbing and, in the hectic final scenes, out of control.

Much has been written about Orton’s own life- and the grisly circumstances of his murder. Too much has been made of the link between the art and the man. What the Butler Saw is harsh comedy but it is also affirmative, as the most splenetic satire always is. Hell breaks loose and chaos abounds but the final image is transcendent. As Orton’s stage direction indicates -“They pick up their clothes and weary, bleeding, drugged and drunk, climb the rope ladder into the blazing light.”

Murray Bramwell
July, 1992 State Theatre Program Notes (?)