[In the following essay, Rusinko reviews previous critical opinion of What the Butler Saw, connecting the play with a theatrical tradition of farce and with the social unrest of the 1960s.]

RANCE:
… I've published a monograph on the subject [madness]. I wrote it at the university. On the advice of my tutor. A remarkable man. Having failed to achieve madness himself he took to teaching it to others.
PRENTICE:
And were you his prize pupil?
RANCE:
There were some more able than I.
PRENTICE:
Where are they now?
RANCE:
In mental institutions.
PRENTICE:
Running them?
RANCE:
For the most part.

(Plays [Complete Plays], 386)

Had Orton lived to see the first production of What the Butler Saw, he might have celebrated a kind of madness in the ironies associated with the posthumous production. The play opened at the Queen's Theatre in the heart of the West End on 5 March 1969, with a cast of stars led by Sir Ralph Richardson in the role of an inspector of mental hospitals, Dr. Rance. Before his death, Orton, in a conversation with a producer, had spoken of the wonderful joke it would be to have his play produced in the “Theater of Perfection” as he dubbed the Haymarket Theatre—to him the home of the kind of middle-class entertainment enjoyed by his epistolary alias, Mrs. Edna Welthorpe. The play was indeed produced at a commercial theater. Further irony resides in the all-star cast, despite which the production failed and about which Orton had opined to the producer that, although he admired Richardson, he had doubts about his comic talent. The production proved Orton right.

In her review of the production, Hilary Spurling called attention to the discrepancy between two “implacably opposed” styles, the “old and new in violent combat”¹—one designed never to give offence (the management of Tenants) and the other whose very existence depends on offending audience sensibilities. The clash of styles, Spurling continues, is most glaring in the performance of Richardson, who spoke his lines with “extraordinary chanting, as though the text had been delivered to him in the form of church responses” (Spurling, 344).

Another ironic touch is the abolition of the theater censorship law in 1968, prior to the production but after the death of Orton. A pattern of censoring had set in with earlier plays. During the successful production of Loot in 1965, Orton had particularly enjoyed talking about the censor's objection to heterosexual references while completely ignoring the “homosexual bits” (Bigsby, 48, 49). The Lord Chamberlain had also cut offensive language in The Erpingham Camp for its airing on television. With the passage of censorship abolition there was no official threat, but in its place came one imposed by Richardson, who insisted on the use of a cigar rather than a phallus in a big scene at the play's end.

The name of Richardson continues into yet another irony: a history of first production failures of Orton's plays. Without the financial aid provided by Rattigan, Entertaining Mr. Sloane may not have made the transfer from the small Arts Theatre to a money-making larger West End theater. Like the first production of Loot (which failed in its provincial tour), What the Butler Saw (1969) failed because of misjudgments in both casting and directing. One lonely voice of approval was that of Frank Marcus, who commented that the farce “will live to be accepted as a comedy classic of English literature.”² Not until 1975, when the Royal Court put on an Orton retrospective, and 1986, when the Manhattan Theater Club mounted a successful production, was Marcus's prophecy realized.

The play, agreed on generally by critics and scholars as Orton's best, is yet another parody, both in its subject matter and style. Having dealt with the hypocrisy of sexual taboos in Entertaining Mr. Sloane, the corruption of law enforcement in Loot, institutionalized entertainment in The Erpingham Camp, corporate paternalism in The Good and Faithful Servant, and religion in Funeral Games, Orton aimed his most devastating and hilarious wit at the new religion—psychiatry—in What the Butler Saw.

Literary genres are also a target of Orton's farce. Having parodied the comedy of manners in Entertaining Mr. Sloane and the mystery genre in Loot, he now turned to farce, particularly one of the oldest of farce premises—twins separated at birth who must eventually reunite with each other and their families. The single most necessary convention in this process is the disguise—one that Orton carries to dizzyingly confusing heights. The multiplicity of Orton's disguises results in the expected confusions of names and identities, teeter-totter plot complications caused by a fast-paced series of exits and entrances, the big scene, and the deus ex machina ending. The sheer multiplication of each of the plot conventions is unprecedented and gives Orton opportunity to demonstrate his subversive and witty anarchy as in no other of his farces.

In Loot, for example, disguises exist in the roles characters assume, such as Inspector Truscott's claim to be an inspector from the water board. Nurse Fay, as well, disguises her actions in the pieties of her Catholic religion. In both characters the disguises exist to personify institutional corruption. In What the Butler Saw, the disguises are physical—clothes—and they exist from the very start to propel manic actions. They propel not only Orton's satire on the corruption of authority figures but his wider inquiry into the philosophical nature of reality. The physical actions, thus, take the play far beyond the satirical thrusts of his earlier plays to metaphysical questions of identity and of man's attempts to hold in check forces of nature that call those attempts into question.

The action begins innocently enough in a mental institution in which the director, Dr. Prentice, with an irresistible proclivity for attractive secretaries, interviews an applicant, Geraldine Barclay. In answer to his questions, she can produce no father or mother, except for one important bit of biographical information: that her mother had been a chambermaid at the Station Hotel. Her stepmother, she further explains, died in an explosion in which a statue of Sir Winston Churchill was damaged, a part of which (a phallus-cum-cigar), became imbedded in her stepmother. A box that Geraldine carries contains that part and becomes the detail with which Orton in his conclusion draws together the loose ends of the play. Prentice's interview of Geraldine, whose sorry qualifications include her ability to take dictation at only 20 words a minute and her lack of mastery of the typewriter keyboard, then moves to its next stage, Prentice's request that she undergo a physical examination. Despite her request for the presence of another woman, he issues his first order to her: “Undress.” It is an order that he will issue repeatedly, to Nicholas Beckett and Sergeant Match, as well as to Geraldine. In succession, he orders one pair of dressing and undressing in order to solve a problem created with the previous one.

Disguises, like the masks in Greek plays, become the order of the day, beginning with the unexpected appearance of Mrs. Prentice, from whom Prentice must hide Geraldine. His wife, nymphomaniacal in her search for sexual satisfaction, has just returned from a meeting of a lesbian club and from a night at the Station Hotel. She is followed by a hotel page, Nicholas Beckett (with whom she had spent the night), who brings with him incriminating photographs taken by the hotel manager. To Nick's comment that options on the photographs had been given to a prospective buyer, she responds with Ortonesque aplomb and wit: “When I gave myself to you the contract didn't include cinematic rights” (Plays, 370). Financially bereft, Nick intends to blackmail her with a request for money and for the position of secretary to Dr. Prentice, the position for which Geraldine is in the process of being interviewed. In approaching her husband about the hiring of Nick, Mrs. Prentice explains Nick's resorting to rape as the result of depression “by his failures in commerce.” She then informs Geraldine that the position is no longer open.

Her intrusion on her husband's attempted affair with Geraldine forces him to begin a dazzling series of disguises and counter-disguises, the first of which involves his hiding the clothes of Geraldine, now nude behind a screen. He finds a convenient flower vase which becomes the focus of subsequent complications. In compliance with his wife's request that he hire Nick, he soon has Nick in shorts and Geraldine in Nick's uniform. Changes of dress increase at a frantic pace as one disguise only breeds the necessity for another. Even his wife, who arrives from her hotel escapade naked under her coat, must be accommodated, the only available dress being Geraldine's. A box Nick carries contains Mrs. Prentice's costume—a wig and a leopard-spotted dress—her disguise during her visit to the Station Hotel and one that Sergeant Match will appropriately don at the conclusion of the play. Thus the clothes of Geraldine, Nick, Match, and Mrs. Prentice become the modus operandi of Orton's plot complications.

Orton parodies another of farce's oldest conventions—the doubling of a character, situation, or object. Orton uses the box Geraldine brings with her, with its contents of the missing part of Sir Winston Churchill's statue, as a plot device to begin and end the play, and he uses Nick's box, containing Mrs. Prentice's attire, as a complicating factor in that plot device. Orton begins his complications with the contents of Nick's box and concludes with that in Geraldine's. It is not enough to have one sexually mad psychiatrist, Prentice; there must be the greedy and theory-obsessed practitioner, Rance, who detects in every action a confirmation of one of his theories. There is a set of twins and not two but three detectivelike interrogators—Prentice, Rance, and the police officer, Match.

Unexpected entrances and exits, another necessary farce convention, continually create new problems for Prentice, until at one point Mrs. Prentice utters, “Doctor, doctor! The world is full of naked men running in all directions” (Plays, 437). When Geraldine appears in a new disguise and Nick suggests restoring normality by one more change of clothes, Prentice replies that he would have to account for the secretary and page boy (the false identities of the two young people). Reminded by Geraldine that the disguises are only disguises and that, therefore, the newly created identities do not exist, Prentice offers one of Orton's many entertaining contortions of logic: “When people who don't exist disappear the account of their departure must be convincing” (Plays, 419). The real madness of Prentice's circular logic, expressed in self-defense, carries its own practical function for him, even as it plays havoc with the various identities that keep changing despite his attempts to stabilize them. The changing relationship of fantasy to reality becomes a precarious balancing act as manic actions and psychiatric insanity keep pace with each other, one illusion replacing another with eye-dazzling speed.

Without any evidence except his own dogmatic beliefs, the theory-spouting Rance imposes his double-incest interpretation on the events, only, in a freakish turnabout, to have his fantasy subsequently proved to be a reality. Thus the appropriateness of the epigraph to the play—a quotation from Cyril Tourneur's The Revenger's Tragedy: “Surely we're all mad people, and they / Whom we think are, are not.”

In a perceptive essay Katharine Worth writes of Orton's view of life as a dream turned into a nightmare, where “ideas keep turning into their opposites on his stage. It's always the clergyman who is the lecherous killer, the policeman—who starts off seeming a solid Dr. Watson figure … who turns out to be the most adept in corruption” (Worth, 76). In this black farce two psychologists rival each other in madness—one sexually and the other professionally—in much the same manner as the two clerics in Funeral Games vie for the title of chief corruptor. With psychiatry replacing religion as a source of hypocrisy in the twentieth century, Dr. Rance, inspector of mental institutions, is the maddest of all. Prentice, like the earlier McCorquodale, merely attempts to survive his initial disaster—attempts that force him to tell lies that necessitate disguises.

To Geraldine's questioning of the necessity of a physical examination for a secretarial applicant, Prentice replies that he needs to see the effect of her stepmother's death on her legs. He then reports the “febrile condition of her calves” as justification for the examination and gains her sympathy by a description of his wife's nymphomania and the resulting malice he has had to endure. She offers to cheer him up, and he, in turn, promises that she can test his new contraceptive device. To all of which she replies that she would be “delighted to help you in any way I can, doctor” (Plays, 368). Her off-setting innocent acquiescence is Orton's comic means of devictimizing her, thus detaching the audience emotionally, an Ortonesque hallmark rendered so effectively in the famous thrashing of Hal by Truscott in Loot.

This balancing act permeates the farce, with Orton's epigrammatic genius reaching such heights as in Mrs. Prentice's use of cultural clichés to justify her otherwise socially unjustifiable behavior. Like her husband who later fends off an accusation with the plea that he is a married man, Mrs. Prentice, upset at the photographs taken by the hotel manager, pleads with him, “Oh, this is scandalous. I am a married woman” (Plays, 370). When she notices her husband's attempt to hide Geraldine's dress, she accuses him of transvestism, in one of Orton's lethally witty attacks on contemporary mores: “I'd no idea our marriage teetered on the edge of fashion.” To which, with an equally devastating freshening-up of a cliché—in this case a biblical one—Prentice responds, “Our marriage is like the peace of God—it passeth all understanding” (Plays, 373). Orton's epigrammatic wit is at its best in this exposure of the disjunction between language and behavior.

In yet another balancing act of style and substance, Orton pits a technical staple of farce—doors—against psychiatric insanity. Doors are especially prominent in popular Feydeau farces that Orton attended in London. He uses the farce convention here to parody itself, and, as well, to satirize psychiatric madness. When Dr. Rance, as inspector of mental institutions, appears, he is immediately suspicious of the many doors in the consulting office: “Was this house designed by a lunatic?” Pouring another whiskey, Prentice replies, “Yes, we have him here as a patient from time to time” (Plays, 377).

Questioning further the architectural features, Rance asks if the skylight is functional, and Prentice replies, “No. It's perfectly useless for anything—except to let light in” (Plays, 377). The nature of Rance's investigative techniques is apparent from the start. Every detail he observes must have some significance other than the obviously pragmatic one. Each significance then only leads to another, with one becoming more ludicrous than its predecessor.

The architectural details are soon lost in the flurry of Rance's next observation—this one more susceptible to psychiatric significance: the nude Geraldine, who Prentice, to cover up his intended indiscretion, claims is a patient. On the basis of Prentice's fabrication of her background, Rance decides immediately that she must be certified. She is the first victim in a series of Rance's instant certifications or attempted certifications. His psychiatric diagnoses of those he meets run a parallel line with the physical disguises Prentice finds himself forced to impose on others. Thus, Geraldine, Nick, and Match are doubly victimized—their identity confusions resolved only in the final disclosure scenes.

In another farcical doubling, Geraldine, having already been subjected to questioning by Prentice, undergoes interrogation by Rance. Passionately imposing his theories on her answers to his questions, he proclaims her denial of rape by her father as an automatic “yes,” for that is only “elementary feminine psychology.” He claims her as a textbook case: “A man beyond innocence, a girl aching for experience. He finds it difficult to reconcile his guilty secret with his spiritual convictions. … She seeks advice from her priest. The Church, true to her ancient traditions, counsels chastity. The result—Madness” (Plays, 383).

Rance has now set in motion what turns out to be a landslide of psychological clichés, turning every word he hears and every action he witnesses into a case study of his theories. When Rance exits, Prentice turns his attention to Nick in the hope of acquiring clothes for Geraldine, and the merry-go-round of costume changes commences in earnest. Ordering Nick to take off his uniform, however, only fuels his wife's accusations of transvestism. Naturalism serves Orton's parodic style, as the consulting-room screen of the doctor doubles as the requisite screen behind which disguises are shed and acquired in the standard farce.

The frenzy of complications begun with the unexpected arrivals—first of Mrs. Prentice, Nick, and then Rance—is quadrupled by that of Sergeant Match, who is there to inquire about Nick and about the missing parts of Sir Winston Churchill's statue. As the object of a possible lawsuit by the Council, with the support of the Conservative and Unionist Party, those parts are the subject of his interrogation of Nick, dressed as Geraldine. In parodic investigative jargon, he asks “her” to “produce or cause to be produced” the missing part. Not missing a beat, Orton blends the formality of investigative language with sexual innuendos in Match's reply:

NICK:
What do they look like?
MATCH:
You're claiming ignorance of the shape and structure of the objects sought?
NICK:
I'm in the dark.
MATCH:
You handled them only at night? We shall draw our own conclusions.
NICK:
I'm not the kind of girl to be mixed-up in that kind of thing. I'm an ex-member of the Brownies.

(Plays, 405)

Ordering yet another of the many medical examinations in the farce, he appoints Mrs. Prentice to examine her (him), since “only women are permitted to examine female suspects” (Plays, 406). Then, as Geraldine enters, dressed as Nick, the first act ends with Match's command: “I want a word with you, my lad” (Plays, 407). Geraldine is now Nick, and Nick is Geraldine. Confusions multiply furiously from this point on, until even the keenest in an Orton audience finds himself, at moments, questioning who is who.

The second act begins with Match shaking his head as Geraldine, dressed as Nick, attempts to correct his confusion with a true account of things. Like Hal in Loot, “he” is straightforward, but Match is only baffled by the truth. To Prentice he asserts, “This is a boy, sir. Not a Girl. If you're baffled by the difference it might be as well to approach both with caution.” Prentice claims that the charge by Geraldine-dressed-as-Nick about Prentice's strange behavior is ridiculous. Claiming “I'm a married man,” he leads Match into one of Orton's most choice epigrams: “Marriage excuses no one the freaks' roll-call” (Plays, 409). Like the Prentices earlier, Match freely offers his sentiments on marriage as a justification for his theories. “Nick's” truthful confession of her real sex, however, does not convince Match and only builds his suspicion of Prentice as pervert and madman. Match then orders yet a third examination of Geraldine.

Match follows one witty dictum with another when Prentice, faced with the likelihood of being charged with homosexuality, claims he is a heterosexual. Match responds, “I wish you wouldn't use these Chaucerian words. It's most confusing” (Plays, 411).

Orton's real madman in the play, however, is Rance, who turns his psychiatric gaze on Prentice and challenges him to prove the charge of molesting Match by committing the act. To vindicate himself, Prentice orders Match to undress, and Match finds himself being examined, taking medication, and eventually donning Mrs. Prentice's leopard-spotted dress.

Rance reaches psychiatric apotheosis in his conclusions about the events he has witnessed. Having proved, Holmesian style, that Prentice has done away with his secretary, Rance now anticipates literary success as a best-seller writer of melodrama:

Lunatics are melodramatic. The subtleties of drama are wasted on them. The ugly shadow of anti-Christ stalks this house. Having discovered her Father/Lover in Dr. Prentice the patient replaces him in a psychological reshuffle by that archetypal figure—the devil himself. Everything is now clear. The final chapters of my book are knitting together: incest, buggery, outrageous women and strange love—cults craving for depraved appetites. All the fashionable bric-a-brac. A beautiful but neurotic girl has influenced the doctor to sacrifice a white virgin to propitiate the dark gods of unreason.

(Plays, 427)

Carried away by his fantasy, Rance interrupts himself to inject an actual line of purple prose from his proposed novel: “When they broke into the evil-smelling den they found her poor body bleeding beneath the obscene and half-erect phallus” (Plays, 427). He concludes his monologue with a self-serving commentary on the great social rewards of his investigation:

My unbiased account of the infamous sex-killer Prentice will undoubtedly add a great deal to our understanding of such creatures. Society must be made aware of the growing menace of pornography. The whole treacherous avant-garde movement will be exposed for what it is—an instrument for inciting decent citizens to commit bizarre crimes against humanity and the state. … You have under your roof, my dear, one of the most remarkable lunatics of all time. We must institute a search for the corpse.

(Plays, 427-28)

Rance's quackery is total as he pronounces Prentice “a transvestite, fetishist, bi-sexual murderer … [who] displays considerable deviational overlap. We may get necrophilia too. As a sort of bonus” (Plays, 428).

Addressing his diagnosis to Mrs. Prentice, Rance links Prentice's “insanity with primitive religion and asks Prentice why he has turned his back on religion. Prentice declares himself a rationalist, incurring Rance's comment that he “can't be a rationalist in an irrational world. It isn't rational” (Plays, 428). Orton's playing around with verbal contradictions takes yet another turn in his use of the term “abnormal normality”:

RANCE:
(to Mrs. Prentice) His belief in normality is quite abnormal. (to Dr. Prentice) Was the girl killed before or after you took her clothes off?
PRENTICE:
He wasn't a girl. He was a man.
MRS. P:
He was wearing a dress.
PRENTICE:
He was a man for all that.

(Plays, 428, 429)

Abnormality as normality or irrationality as rationality illustrate Orton's by now legendary reinvention of axiomatic usage. He spares no authority, even, as in the last quoted line, famous literary allusions that have entered common usage.

Contradictory actions match contradictory linguisms. At a point in the play where any distinctions between fantasy and reality have vanished, Nick finds himself in Sergeant Match's uniform and interrupts Rance's allegations against Prentice to announce that he has just arrested his own brother, Nicholas Beckett (himself). Like Geraldine's earlier attempts at truthfulness, his comments are pounced upon by Rance as fuel for his psychiatric theories.

A mad scene follows in which Mrs. Prentice attempts to force her husband at gunpoint to have sex with her, and, failing to do so, shoots at him. Confusion breaks loose as bodies pile up on the floor, concluding in the mutual threats by Rance and Prentice to certify each other. The madness seems total. Even the blood flowing from the injuries incurred by Nick and Match in the melee is not real to Rance, whose obsession with theorizing only hardens as events feed it. For Nick and Match, the personal consequence is bloody, and for all, the social consequence is the eventual return to the normal order of things, agreed on in the conspiracy among Prentice, Rance, and Match to keep the events out of the papers.

Orton relies on another centuries-old farce convention to unravel the secrets and restore legitimate identities: the use of a trivial object, in this case a brooch. French farceurs, as with Sardou in A Glass of Water, regularly used such artifices by which to move the plot or to resolve the confusions in their plays. Shakespeare for his purpose used the handkerchief in Othello, and Wilde the handbag in The Importance of Being Earnest. Orton's brooch had been broken in two by Mrs. Prentice, each half pinned to a twin. Geraldine and Nick are revealed to be those long-lost twins born to Dr. and Mrs. Prentice as the consequence of their premarital liaison in a cupboard at the Station Hotel. They produce their halves of the brooch given them by their mother when she had to give them up.

Rance is ecstatic as he triumphantly announces a double incest that “is even more likely to produce a best-seller than murder—and this is as it should be for love must bring greater joy than violence” (Plays, 446). Double incest—Prentice's attempted rape of his daughter and Mrs. Prentice's alleged assault by her son—is beyond even Rance's wildest hopes as a psychiatrist and as a novelist.

Orton has broken boundaries in daring to take his “happy ending” beyond that of the conventional farce. He pronounces no judgment on the violators in the double-incest situation. Indeed, the major villain, Rance, who already profits from imposing his theories on others, will only increase his profits with his lucrative novel. As in the ending of Loot—Truscott's conspiracy to share the loot with Hal, Dennis, and Fay—Rance, Prentice, and Match compliment each other on “uncovering a number of remarkable pecadilloes” and promise to “cooperate in keeping them out of the papers” (Plays, 448).

Orton's parody of the happy ending is accomplished by not one but several big scenes involving the clearing up of the disguises with the brooch-engendered revelations of the twins' identities and with a second object—the missing part of the Churchill statue. With the latter, the farce returns to its first-act mystery—the contents of Geraldine's box which held the evidence of Geraldine's stepparentage. In his use of both brooch and phallus, Orton doubles Wilde's use of one object, the famous handbag. Match's earlier request that “someone produce or cause to be produced the missing parts of Sir Winston Churchill” (Plays, 447) is answered by Geraldine's producing the box with which she had initially arrived for her interview. From this box Match triumphantly lifts “a section from a larger than life-sized bronze statue” (Plays, 447). Present at the blowing up of Churchill's statue, the only mother Geraldine had ever known had left her stepdaughter a legacy. Geraldine's assumption that the box she was given at Mrs. Barclay's funeral contained only her mother's clothes is dispelled, and she is proclaimed by Match as “the only living descendant of a woman violated by the hero of 1940” (Plays, 447). Orton's devilish trick is the coinciding of Geraldine's personal heritage with that of the nation. Orton's final attack on audience sensibilities occurs in Rance's declaration that blends Churchillian cigar and Ortonian phallus: “How much more inspiring if, in those dark days [World War II] we'd seen what we see now. Instead we had to be content with a cigar—the symbol falling far short, as we all realize, of the object itself” (Plays, 447).

Personal, national, and historical occurrences undergo a ritual sanctification in the pagan-Christian scene with which the play closes. Herculean in his leopard-spotted dress, the missing Sergeant Match appears through a skylight in “a great blaze of glory” (Plays, 446). The final words, however, are Rance's as all, clothed in their tattered “fig leaves,” leave their Edenic frolics and follow Match up the ladder to face the world.

Orton's laughter at the corrupted order of things is complete in its purity, untouched by distracting personal revenge or sympathy with characters (however unintended) as with Wilson in The Ruffian on the Stair, Buchanan in The Good and Faithful Servant, or McLeavy in Loot. A dead mother's eye and false teeth (Entertaining Mr. Sloane) and a severed hand (Funeral Games) are not present to cause audience unease. The farcical mode is intact throughout. With the distance of time, even the phallus, essential to Orton's antic mode, does not induce the audience unease that accompanies the eye and teeth of earlier plays.

One minor caveat to this total detachment is the bowdlerized ending of the play, when Geraldine looks into the box and sees a cigar rather than a phallus. Even here, however, that ending is canceled by Rance's reference to her identification as an illusion of youth. Aside from the alternate ending—and one that a number of scholars see as an opening of the meaning to various approaches—the play remains uncompromised in its detachment—a feat noticeably taking shape in The Erpingham Camp and Funeral Games and perfected in What the Butler Saw.

Kenneth Williams, an actor in Loot, recalls Orton's frequent quoting of “Wilde's dictum: ‘Talent is the infinite capacity for taking pains.’ He took pains. Polish. Reconstruct. Give you another edition. Another page. Every word polished painstakingly until the whole structure glitters” (quoted in Lahr 1978, 202-203). What the Butler Saw is Orton's glittering structure line upon line, right up to the very last one by Rance, who parodies Adam's departure from the Garden of Eden with “Let us put on our clothes and face the world” (Plays, 448). It is this brilliance of detachment toward which Orton had worked since his prison days.

Wilde's influence is seen in the big revelatory scene as Orton parades characters and actions from The Importance of Being Earnest. He transforms Wilde's Canon Chasuble into Dr. Prentice, Miss Prism into Mrs. Prentice, Algernon and Jack into Nick and Geraldine, and the identifying handbag into a similarly functioning brooch. There is even a quick allusion to Wilde's handbag in one of Prentice's many angry retorts to his wife: “Unless you're very careful you'll find yourself in a suitcase awaiting collection” (Plays, 393). Orton goes far beyond Wilde, however, in his addition of the character of Rance, whose theories are now to be transformed into a money-making potboiler.

The real success of What the Butler Saw, however, lies in Orton's transformation of the characters and situations from earlier plays into a stylistic balancing act heretofore not realized. There are the innocents and the authority figures, both of whom Orton mocks. One character type that continues in What the Butler Saw is the pair of innocents who, although victims of others, manage to devictimize themselves mostly by their truth-telling. Their lineage goes back to the two brothers in The Ruffian on the Stair, to Hal and Dennis in Loot, and the twins in The Good and Faithful Servant. Like Hal, Nick and Geraldine attempt to tell the truth whenever an opportunity presents itself, but no one will believe them. They can do little except become caught up in the whirl of events. To the Kath-like Mrs. Prentice, Orton adds a farcical touch of dysfunctional sexuality to the nymphomania both exhibit. There are the two authorities—psychiatrists who are the new religion, Milton's new presbyters as old priests writ large. They resemble the two competitive clerics in Funeral Games in their hostility to each other. There is, finally, the Truscott-like Sergeant Match, whose sleuthing here serves as a compounding of the psychiatric sleuthing of Rance. Both proceed with Holmesian deductive methods to put the final touches to the solution of Orton's mysteries.

Any vestiges of Pinteresque intruders are transformed into farcical types that go beyond the satirical stereotypes of earlier plays. Rance and Match carry out their duties in a sublimely unshakable conviction of sexual and professional fantasies, totally oblivious to the realities in which the others are maneuvering their ways in and out of mistaken identities. All are victims of a sort, except for Rance, who remains at the end as he was in the beginning—untouched by events.

Unlike Orton's other plays, What the Butler Saw contains no murders or deaths, no personal revenge. The emphasis on revenge is transformed into one on madness. The catalyst for the transformation is the sexual energy that drives Prentice and the passion that drives the theories of Rance. The phallic instinct embraces a wide variety of sexual experiences—for instance, heterosexuality, homosexuality, transvestism, rape, incest.

Orton seems to have exorcised family figures and relationships in his earlier work, so that they do not exist as important sources for the characters anymore. His father and mother—haunting the characters of Kath and Kemp in Entertaining Mr. Sloane, Buchanan in The Good and Faithful Servant, and McLeavy in Loot—have vanished. Although, like Elsie and John Orton, the Prentices live separate lives, Mrs. Prentice's active engagement in sexual liaisons at the Station Hotel go far beyond the attempts of Mrs. Orton merely to make herself physically attractive. Furthermore, Mrs. Prentice's actions serve more as a farcical doubling to move the plot than as a characterization technique. Sex itself is treated only partly in the manner of a traditional farce—like a Feydeau character's bumbling to disguise the idea of indiscretion rather than the literal action. There is one exception—Mrs. Prentice, whose sexual escapade with Nick is not only real but also, as asserted in a comment by Rance, natural. Another autobiographical detail prominent in earlier plays—the garden and floral imagery associated with William Orton—functions only as a minor mover of the plot rather than as developer of character. Prentice tries desperately to hide incriminating evidence in a vase from which roses have to be moved repeatedly to hide a new indiscretion.

Most important, Orton has finally exorcised the personal need to offend audience sensibilities, having already done so explicitly in actions such as Ed's and Kath's sharing of Sloane or of Hal's disturbing violations of his mother's body. With all elements of his farce—real and unreal—existing in proportion to each other, his outrage still energizes the actions, but it does so in hilarious complications that grow dizzyingly from one man's—Prentice's—phallic instinct. Mechanically, the plot begins and ends with a phallus carried on stage in Geraldine's box. A symbol as old as Aristophanes' Lysistrata, the phallus is nature's force against destructive authority—Aristophanes' target being the insanity of war.

Orton's earlier attacks on religion, law, politics, and corporate parentalism come together in his final battle with authority. His lifelong war began in Head to Toe, with the character of Gombold, who learns to use words to rage correctly. Although Rance, unlike the giant, lives, his creator's verbal weaponry has hit its mark with unprecedented farcical accuracy.

Orton's attacks on Rance expose fashionably glib theories that, in the context in which they are expressed, are as mad as Rance's obsession to impose them automatically on the events he witnesses. His observations drawn from the seemingly endless changes of dress prompt him to conclude that Prentice is a pervert, “a man who mauls young boys, importunes policemen and lives on terms of intimacy with a woman who shaves twice a day” (Plays, 417). When Prentice informs his wife that he has given his secretary the sack, she concludes that he has killed Geraldine and put her body into a sack. Her comments lead Rance, in a series of logical leaps, to link Prentice to primitive religions. Prentice's response to Rance's further accusations of atheism is that he is a rationalist, eliciting from Rance one of the play's most often repeated lines: “You can't be a rationalist in an irrational world. It isn't rational” (Plays, 428).

As Orton's spokesman for contemporary theories, Rance in his madness is endowed with financial preoccupations. He concludes with a reference to his “documentary type ‘novelette’” that should reap “twelve record-breaking reprints. I'll be able to leave the service of the Commissioners and bask in the attentions of those who, like myself, find other people's iniquity puts money in their purse” (Plays, 424-25).

In contrast, the behavior of Prentice, at first more farcically human than psychiatrically insane, is rapidly energized into a madness of its own, swept on by the passionate intensity with which Rance leaps from personal and societal levels to anthropological significance. Rance refers at one point to “the startling ideas of Dr. Goebbels on the function of the male sexual organ” from which “we pass quite logically to white golliwogs. An attempt, in fact, to change the order of creation—homosexuality slots in here—dabbling in the black arts! The reported theft of the private parts of a well-known public figure ties in with this theory. We've phallic worship under our noses or I'm a Dutchman” (Plays, 424). With one brilliant structural ploy, Orton links Rance's insanity with a detail with which the play opens—the contents of the box with which Geraldine enters Prentice's office. It is this detail with which Orton resolves the complications created by Prentice and Rance.

The circularity of Orton's farcical plot remains intact and the object of his satire—psychiatric insanity—remains firmly in place to the end. Katharine Worth writes of a correspondence between the madness in Orton's play and the earnestness in Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest. Both are the “root vice of the play; all the other ills are seen branching out from it” (Worth, 81). She also points out an adverse truth that she regards as the central joke of Orton's plot: that the “invented identities turn out to be after all, the true ones” (Worth, 81). As a result of the disguises foisted on them, Nick and Geraldine do turn out to be in reality closer to their invented selves than they or anyone else had imagined—all of this the result of Prentice's indiscretion, the “original sin” of the play. They experience the sexual decompartmentalization of which Orton has often spoken, as realities within fantasies and truths within lies abound in the play. The punch and counterpunch of sanity and insanity momentarily liberate even as they create the wild plot complications and eventually establish family relationships.

Worth views the farce, despite its many similarities to Wilde, to the Aldwych tradition, or to the standard French farce, as a bacchanalian dream to which an end is put by the deus ex machina but also a dream that gives both “a great id-releasing experience and a reassuring demonstration of the power of wit to control it” (Worth, 84). The darkness consists in the fantasies that underlie life, and it is the balance between these fantasies and life that results in health. Like Alice's bottle instructions—“Drink Me”—farce as antidote threatens as possible poison but ultimately frees. Worth uses as a case in point Geraldine Barclay, who never grasps Prentice's overtures as seduction attempts. Her failure to do so results in her breaking up “into a number of different selves” (Worth, 80). Transformation after transformation occurs as the secretary is hunted by Mrs. Prentice, Rance, and Match. The released spirits of secretary and hotel page, created by their changes of clothes, float freely as shapes for the “real characters to go in and out of.” Their real identities as illegitimate children are the result of the freeing of the id. Orton said that his aim in What the Butler Saw (as in Loot) was to “break down all the sexual compartments people have” (quoted in Gordon, 91).

Maurice Charney has cataloged the compartments in the farce as “all possible varieties of sexual behaviour, buggery, necrophilia, exhibitionism, hermaphroditism, rape, sadomasochism, fetishism, transvestism, nymphomania and the triumphant mock-Wildean recognition scene, in which sexual fulfillment awaits the ‘bleeding, drugged and drunk' characters’” (Charney, 101-102). He might have added to his list Orton's favorite id-releasor—one he proudly records in his Diaries and was, he claims, borrowed from Entertaining Mr. Sloane by Pinter in The Homecoming—the sharing of sexual partners.

Both Worth and Charney call attention to the parodic title of Orton's last play. Unfettered by the presence of the requisite butler, the play is about what the butler may have seen had Orton, indeed, included such a character. Worth notes that not one of the characters sees a given situation as does another, so that all free-float in their respective ways, each unrestricted by views of another. The experiences of the missing butler and the play's characters can be extended to individual members of any given audience who may experience similar liberation.

Charney brings a historical perspective to his views of Orton's farce with references to sources and analogues that begin with the play from which Orton has lifted the epigraph—Tourneur's The Revenger's Tragedy, one of the “most extravagant of seventeenth-century black comedies … a play much influenced by Shakespeare's Hamlet” (Charney, 98). He attributes the turning of the play, as in Hamlet, on the matter of the missing father, with the resulting connection with incest and other odd matters of sexual satisfaction. Beyond Tourneur and Shakespeare, there is Orton's replacement of satire with saturnalia, which provides a “comic release from the burdens of sexual identity” (Charney, 100). This, Charney points out, reflects Orton's combination of the virtues of the old and new farce—“tumultuous sexual energy of Aristophanes, the careful intrigue plotting of Plautus” (Charney, 107). These Greek, Roman, and Renaissance characteristics coexist with the black comedy styles of Beckett, Pinter, Ionesco, Stoppard, and especially Brecht.

The specific Tourneuresque qualities identified by Charney are the “bizarre and unanticipatable shifts in tone” and the “almost hysterically rhetorical” flights, so that the designation of the play as tragedy is justified only “by certain technicalities of its endings” (Charney, 98). Those technicalities—in general the return of nighttime dreams to daytime realities and specifically the blood spilling and tattered clothing—seem at odds with the farcical tone of the rest of the play. Yet they can be seen as much more than “technicalities.”

Detailed Jacobean assimilations are dealt with by William Hutchings, who asserts that it is the influence of this literary period that “supersedes [that of] all other sources and analogues.” He notes, first of all, the “inherent theatricality of madness”³ that is so much a part of Renaissance tradition, beginning with the real madness of Hieronymo in Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy (1586) and with the title character's feigned madness in Hamlet (1602). Hutchings draws a picture of the psychiatrist's office as the “modern counterpart of the Jacobean stage's Italianate court,” where, “amid elaborate intrigues, disguises, and self-serving duplicities—all sorts of passions and lusts, however forbidden or illicit, flourish outside any norms of moral judgment, unrestrained by social taboos and regarded with clinical detachment by both perpetrators and authorities in charge” (Hutchings, 229). The revelations of young women to be men and men to be women are those found, respectively, in Jonson's Epicoene (1609) and in Beaumont and Fletcher's Philaster (1610) and Shakespeare's Twelfth Night (1602). In few periods has incest been so prevalent a dramatic theme as in the seventeenth century: John Ford's 'Tis a Pity She's a Whore (1627), Beaumont and Fletcher's A King and No King (1611), and Middleton's Women, Beware Women (1623).

In his reference to the unsettling shift in tone in the ending of Orton's farce, Hutchings recalls a reverse shifting of tone, not unlike Orton's, in the unusually harsh punishments in Ben Jonson's Volpone (1605). Neither Jonson nor Orton relates to “any righting of a ‘moral balance,’” nor in either is justice meted out fairly “since equally ‘guilty’ characters do not suffer alike” (Hutchings, 231). Hutchings refers to the asylums in Rowley and Middleton's The Changeling (1622)—asylums run by Alibius and Lollio much as those run by Prentice and Rance. Hutchings emphasizes Orton's insistence on the copious blood shed by Nick and Match—a detail euphemized in some productions. With bloodshed as the essence of Jacobean tragedy, Orton's insistence on it, despite the discomfiting shift in style, is in order. It is there even in The Erpingham Camp, a television farce with a style similar to that of What the Butler Saw. What makes Orton's kinships with influences different from those, for example, in the plays of Tom Stoppard are Orton's cunning concealing of them so that they unify the play “in ways that were not apparent to its earliest reviewers” and in so doing justify “the seemingly inapposite bloodshed” (Hutchings, 234). It is this inapposition that Charney dismisses and that Hutchings regards importantly as part of Orton's daring “to outrage conventional proprieties” (Hutchings, 234).

Beyond all the influences or analogues linked with Orton's plays, what places Orton's genius in a category by itself is what Leslie Smith refers to as the medieval feast of fools—the brief carnival period that preceded the restoration of order. Farce has, until Orton, assumed the rightness of that order. Orton has written his name into dramatic history by his dissension with the traditional farce ending, nowhere more hilarious and dark than in What the Butler Saw. In his “modern and uncompromising vision, that feast of fools, in all its grotesqueness and licence, [Orton] offers a permanent image of the human condition, not a temporary one.”⁴

Orton refuses to cleanse and restore the body politic. He chooses merely to continue the status quo—reality's outrage, as he has stated. Furthermore, he has done so by writing subversively in a language that Hilary Spurling says gives the impression of being a foreign language, one that “for all its sharp intelligence and formal polish, … is firmly rooted in the shabby, baggy catchphrases of contemporary speech; [Orton is] almost alone among contemporary playwrights” (Spurling, 344).

One of few dissenting voices about the relative merits of What the Butler Saw is John Russell Taylor, who, having lauded Entertaining Mr. Sloane as a comedy of manners and Loot as a parody of the detective genre, sees What the Butler Saw as less successful than Orton's other plays, primarily on the basis of the absence of a norm (or a straight man) on which the very idea of farce rests. Consequently, in his view the play “soon becomes reduced to a succession of lines and happenings in a total vacuum” (Taylor, 138). Taylor then qualifies his stance as a possibly unfair one in “taking apart a play which comes to us in what we may presume to be an extremely provisional form” (Taylor, 139). Orton, having been irked by Taylor's earlier references to Entertaining Mr. Sloane as commercial entertainment, had he been alive, would have been even more irritated with Taylor's extension of the commercial label to What the Butler Saw.

In 1995 the stage history of What the Butler Saw came full circle, from its failed premiere at a West End theater in 1969, through subsequent successes at the Royal Court Theatre in 1975 and at New York's Manhattan Theater Club in 1989, to the ultimate honor—a production at one of England's two most prestigious theaters, the Royal National Theatre. Three seasoned critics pose interesting contrasts in their evaluations, all referring to the 1969 disaster. Irving Wardle, who admitted to eating his words about 1969 yet holding reservations about 1975, now judged the first act of the 1995 production to be sublime and John Alderton's running of “the longest gag in living memory” to be a guarantee of this revival's holding “a permanent place in the Orton annals.”⁵ Even reluctant Benedict Nightingale, like Wardle “a Loot fan,” seemed to look mostly for an explanation of why the “gales of laughter” ended as “blustery gusts.”⁶ Michael Billington, however, noted the production's (Phyllida Lloyd's) “absolute understanding of Orton's peculiar mix of verbal precision and sexual anarchy,” of his “ability to depict gathering chaos with algebraic precision and Wildean finesse,” and of his skill in escalating the frenzy of “authority disintegrating into panic.”⁷ As bedraggled characters “ascend skywards on Mark Thompson's glittering golden platform, it is as if the world of farcical mayhem has suddenly been invaded by Euripides and sixties satire has mated with The Bacchae.” To Billington's comment one may add that the 1960s turbulences in What the Butler Saw reach into those of seventeenth-century Britain as well as Euripides' time, all three periods marked by social and political upheavals.

Notes

1. Hilary Spurling, “Young Master,” Spectator, 14 March 1969, 344; hereafter cited in text.

2. Frank Marcus, Sunday Telegraph, 9 March 1969, n.p.

3. William Hutchings, “Joe Orton's Jacobean Assimilations in What the Butler Saw,” in Themes of Drama, vol. 10, Farce, ed. J. Redmond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 228; hereafter cited in text.

4. Leslie Smith, “Joe Orton,” in Modern British Farce (Totowa, N.J.: Barnes & Noble, 1989), 131; hereafter cited in text.

5. Irving Wardle, Independent, 5 March 1995, n.p.

6. Benedict Nightingale, Times, 4 March 1995, 5.

7. Michael Billington, Guardian, 4 March 1995, 28.