The Sexual Offences Act legalising consensual homosexual acts passed into law on 27 July 1967. Two weeks later, Joe Orton, whose volatile relationship with Kenneth Halliwell was a cause célèbre, was murdered by his lover, who then committed suicide.
Orton had already made his reputation as a playwright with Entertaining Mr Sloane and Loot, the latter having undergone several redrafts, often while on tour. At the time, What the Butler Saw was still to go into rehearsal—and whether Orton would have modified it if he had been able to work with actors and directors we shall never know.
The farcical plot opens with Dr Prentice trying to seduce his prospective secretary, Geraldine, only to be interrupted first by his wife, then her blackmailing hotel porter Nicholas, a policemen, and a nutty government inspector Dr Rance, who relishes publishing a book about the incest, buggery and general sexual goings-on that he thinks he has discovered.
Geraldine’s stepmother died when a gas explosion demolished a statue of Winston Churchill. Much cross-dressing and some family surprises later, it is discovered that the woman was killed by the former PM’s detached, most delicate anatomical part as it flew through the air.
Orton garners the ordure of many years of hostility and flings it back with added force at the establishment, at psychological chicanery and at homophobic prejudice.
He set out to shock—there is talk of golliwogs—but particularly of sexual matters. Prentice says of his promiscuous wife that she was likely to be buried in a Y-shaped coffin, and when she lies that Nicholas failed in his attempt to rape her, Rance laments that service in hotels these days is terrible.
The humour is a mixture of Oscar Wilde sarcasm and Goonish absurdity lavishly served up with malicious bile. The play has continued to divide opinion, and I have to say that whereas it seemed shocking to refer to rape at all in 1967, now it seemed to me distasteful to treat it as a source of mirth.
Bek Palmer’s extraordinary set draws upon surrealist fantasies, particularly the disturbing forum townscapes of Giorgio Di Chirico, reflecting the surreal characters of Orton’s invention.
His earlier black comedies worked because they set fairly ordinary people in extraordinary or absurd situations; What the Butler Saw puts absurd people in absurd situations, and that I fear is its weakness. Real people are amusing, caricatures less so, and I’m afraid I sat stoney-faced for much of the time.