What the Butler Saw

By Joe Orton

Directed by: Richard Fawcett

If you’re not familiar with the work of Joe Orton, you really need to get out more.  

So what happens in What the Butler Saw? Eh.....nothing actually, merely chaos in a madhouse. In the principal doctor’s consulting room, Geraldine has come for an interview but instead of getting the secretary’s job, ends up naked, shaven and sedated. The doctor’s wife, Mrs Prentice, has spent the better – or worse – part of the previous night in a hotel linen cupboard with a pageboy and proceeds to drink her way out of trauma. The pageboy, Nick, turns up to black-mail Mrs Prentice and dresses in Geraldine’s abandoned clothing.

Unsurprisingly, this supposedly medical institution needs to be inspected, and the role of Dr Rance is to do just that – it is altogether incidental that he should prove to be in addition an obsessive sexual fantasist. Dr Prentice, undone by lust or rather the failure to achieve its object, is nominally in charge of the whole nightmare, and the policeman (as you might guess) is pursuing an enquiry into the mysterious disappearance of Winston Churchill’s genitals.

Admittedly, this does not really explain how he comes to be dressed as Mrs Prentice. And, if that were not sufficient, Orton chooses to make his play a farce, so it’s also incredibly funny.