Curve revives Orton’s What the Butler Saw

Published: 25 February 2017
Reporter: Steve Orme

What the Butler Saw in rehearsal

Fifty years after the death of celebrated Leicester playwright Joe Orton, the city’s Curve is to bring to the stage Orton’s last play which was completed only a month before his death.

The theatre’s artistic director Nikolai Foster will direct What the Butler Saw. It features Rufus Hound as Dr Prentice, a psychiatric doctor in a private clinic who is attempting to interview—and seduce—a would-be secretary. He hides the girl when he is surprised by his wife.

The affairs multiply as Mrs Prentice is seduced and blackmailed by a bellhop. When a government inspector arrives followed by a sergeant who is searching for missing parts of Winston Churchill, chaos, cross-dressing and mistaken identity are rife.

Hound played Freddy in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels the Musical in 2014 and Francis Henshall in Richard Bean’s One Man, Two Guvnors in 2013.

Dakota Blue Richards is would-be secretary Geraldine. She played Stella in Curve’s production of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire in 2015. Catherine Russell who was Nurse Ratched in Curve’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest in 2011 plays Mrs Prentice.

Jack Holden who plays bellhop Nicholas Beckett was Lysander in the RSC’s 2016 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Jasper Britton who plays the government inspector is another actor with RSC experience and played the lead in Henry IV Part 1 in 2014. Ravi Aujla takes the role of Sergeant Match.

What the Butler Saw which contains “naughty bits and language some people may find offensive” runs at Curve from Friday 3 March until Saturday 18 March. Press night is Wednesday 8 March.

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