[In the following excerpt from a review of two plays, Brustein comments that, in light of the shock value of contemporary entertainment, Orton's work seems less outrageous than it once did.]

An example of [unrealized promise] is currently on view at the Manhattan Theatre Club in Joe Orton's What the Butler Saw. Orton, who died at 34, was notable for taking the traditional conventions of farce and burlesque and liberating their underground meanings. Sensitive to the sexual and aggressive connotations of the most inoffensive-seeming gags, and particularly fond of the comic possibilities of transvestism, he gained something of a dangerous reputation by daring to make these manifest. But an age that has experienced Camp, the Theater of the Ridiculous, Ethyl Eichelberger, and Monty Python, not to mention Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy's Raw, is likely to find Orton rather tame. What the Butler Saw today looks like a highly carpentered, sometimes mechanical and contrived farce, full of physical action and verbal amusement but suffering a little from period fatigue.

The play takes place in a doctor's office with an inordinate number of doors. “Why are there so many doors?” the doctor is asked. “Was your house designed by a lunatic?” Actually, multiple exits are the design required by the lunatic logic of farce, but it is Orton's inspiration to set this farce in a madhouse. When the curtain rises, Dr. Prentice (Charles Keating) is asking a curvaceous job applicant (Joanne Whalley-Kilmer) to disrobe in order to determine her suitability for the position. Enter the doctor's nymphomaniac wife (Carole Shelley), accompanied by the bell boy (Bruce Norris) who tried to rape her, and followed by a policeman (Patrick Tull) looking for a phallus missing from a statue of Winston Churchill. Before long, the effort to hide the naked girl and conceal her clothes becomes the engine of the plot. Most of the funnier jokes are indebted to burlesque (She: “You put me in an impossible position.” He: “No position's impossible when you're young and healthy”). But What the Butler Saw is essentially a relentless farce about clothes involving transvestism and gender confusion.

The transsexual overtones of this crossdressing emerge from time to time. More often, it is treated, like the convention of Elizabethan disguise, as a case of mistaken identity, a stimulus for laughter. What is not altogether funny, however, is Orton's treatment of women. The job applicant, being certified insane, has her head shaved, gets stuffed in a straitjacket, and is brutally beaten in a scene that touches on realism. Like most cartoon characters, she shows no lasting ill effects, and after a series of mad chases, proves to be the long-lost daughter of Dr. and Mrs. Prentice in a Gilbert and Sullivan denouement full of incestuous implications. But the hidden will at work here occasionally breaks out of the comic frame into genuine misogyny.

Under John Tillinger's laissez-faire direction, the production lurches between languorous undulation and super-animation. While the rest of the mostly British cast gets by with high-velocity, deadpan deportment, that fine actor, Joseph Maher, as Dr. Rance, sometimes seems at sea amidst the general mayhem. What's most disappointing, though, is the impression left by Orton himself, who with the passage of time appears to have been assimilated by the very conventions he thought he was flouting. What the Butler Saw retains some vitality as a manic farce, but with the edge of danger gone, it rushes past you like a high-speed train without a destination.