WHAT THE BUTLER SAW - AT THE ARTS THEATRE
What did the butler see? Joe Orton’s oh-so-Sixties peep show throws everything excluding the kitchen-sink drama at the audience. Any butler would be exhausted. His 1967 hyper farce is a rapid fire mind-bender of outrageous iconoclasm and witty epigrams. Think a Beatles-era Oscar Wilde on speed dial.
Orton’s swan song play (he was killed a few days after writing the play) defies a plot summary. Suffice to say the setting is a Dr Prentice’s consulting room. He is a psychiatrist more Fraudian than Freudian. He is no kind of real therapist but a cartoon cypher of the mental health white coat who is much madder than his patient. If this offends, stay away from the play. Sanity and its opposite are the building blocks of Orton’s savage satire on – well on nearly everything: the political establishment in post-war Britain, the quackery (as Orton saw it) of the psychiatric profession and this being a sixties play, much ado about sex, nudity, homosexual relations, transvestism and even a nod towards pediastry. Nothing was sacred in Orton’s world. Not even Winston Churchill’s male appendage – or rather a bronze cast of it which has sadly gone missing after an unfortunate mishap by the gas board. The script is so funny that one almost feels guilty for laughing at such un-PC issues. But then Orton was writing nearly 60 years ago and with the intention of shocking us – and he still does after all these years.
The production at the Arts Theatre directed by Michael Cabot brings Orton’s loquacious lunacy to the stage with great aplomb. Fast moving hardly cuts it. The tsunami of words – so many of them barbed and very funny, are sometimes hard to catch. John Dorney as the shrink is the ideal farceur: wound up like a demented mechanical bunny and falling into a crackpot mishmash of racing through doors. He has demonic energy. Jack Lord is also excellent as Dr Rance, the archetypal Orton figure of fun: the pompous asylum inspector who spouts daft Freudian theories whilst thinly hiding lascivious desires and the promise of a mega book deal. There were first-rate performances too from Alana Jackson as Miss Barclay a would-be secretary, subject of sexual desire and Alex Cardall as a bewildered hotel bell boy who had tried to rape Prentice’s wife (played with increasingly hilarious hysteria by Holly Smith).
The set designed by Bek Palmer is literally surreal. We are not in any kind of real health centre but one rather imagined by Magritte, Dali or MC Escher – there is even a strange staircase leading nowhere. Though the play is still very odd – it’s like seeing Noises Off with a script by Oscar Wilde – it is a joy to watch and savour. It is daring, often outrageous but still fiercely funny.
