The playwright Joe Orton had a short but eventful theatre career in the late 1960’s. His writing was as controversial and shocking as his private life, and eventual death at the hands of his lover Kenneth Halliwell.
Going along to see this touring production of Orton’s play What the Butler Saw at the New Wolsey theatre, I wondered if it would still have the power to shock and surprise 55 years on from when it was first produced.
I didn’t have to wonder for very long.
To be fair we had been warned. The website states very clearly:
Contains strong language and subject matter which the playwright very much hoped audiences would find offensive. Age Guidance: 14+. Contains strong language, adult theses, mild nudity, and discussions of sexual assault.
But I still don’t think the audience was totally ready for just how daring Orton’s words are today. This wasn’t just near the knuckle, it was way past your knuckles, over the wrists and right up to the elbows.
No topic was off limits; rape, incest, adultery, sexual preferences, homosexuality and insanity, and as shocking as all this was back in 1969 it’s just as shocking, if not more so, now. Although the audience found themselves, at times, laughing, it was nervous laughter as if we felt ashamed of even raising a smile at the content.
Orton didn’t just make offensive jokes for the sake of it though. He was always pushing the boundaries of decency and good taste in drama and holding a mirror up to the sexual hypocrisies of the middle classes, in a time, it’s important to remember, when homosexuality was still a criminal offence.
Despite finding the subject matter tough to take, I couldn’t fault the technical aptitude of the 6 actors here. What The Butler Saw has all the classic physically exhausting and demanding challenges of a traditional farce, coupled with the wordy, witty and richy dense dialogue of Orton. Each of them handled the show perfectly with the absurdity of the situations and the mania building beautifully, especially in the second act, after a slightly slower start in the first, but of course that is how farce builds.
In my opinion you could never set this play in any other time than it was written. There are references to gender, society’s attitudes to women and nods to the Second World War and particularly Winston Churchill ( and a particular part of Winston Churchill), that just wouldn’t sit well if you were to try and modernise the setting. To this end the set design was a riot of 60’s pop art images, cut and paste on a brightly coloured, cartoon like background with a heavy Monty Python influence and was one of the most stunning things about the whole production. This play is a ‘cartoon’, the characters are exaggerated and the situation ludicrous. But even so, the audience just couldn’t relax and allow themselves to be totally taken in, because the dialogue is just too much for our tastes now.
This is a national tour by the theatre company London Classic Theatre, who put on these challenging and older plays. On the way home I thought about how the cast were amazing but the writing hasn’t dated at all well.
Orton died before the play was ever performed and as a result this is his work in its raw, unedited form. I wonder if he would have honed and refined some aspects had he seen it on the stage for himself. Audiences were shocked in 1969 when the play was first put on and seemed just as shocked over 50 years later. So was there ever a point, in that cycle of time, when audiences did laugh riotously at the jokes against women, and causal mentions of rape and sexual assault? Was there ever a ‘sweet spot’ when all this was funny? Maybe now, that times have changed so much, we’ll never know!
What The Butler Saw is at the New Wolsey theatre until Saturday 8th June – visit their website for more details and tickets.
The tour continues around the county and in East Anglia at
Theatre Royal Bury St Edmunds 25th – 29th June
Cambridge Arts Theatre – 17th -20th July
Chelmsford Theatre 25th-27th July
SUFFOLK THEATRE 