What The Butler Saw
60's controversy at the Maddermarket
Ah, the 1960’s. I’m told it was the decade of free love. As an arrangement I have always felt this to be fiscally unsound and wholly impractical. Surely ‘negotiable affection’, a sliding price scale based upon annual earnings or a tariff system would be a more amicable and sustainable system. An honest wage for an honest night’s work.
At a glance, Joe Orton’s classic farce seems to provide sufficient amounts of nudity (can there ever be sufficient amounts!?) to enforce this free ideal. In fact, however, we very quickly discover that adequate remuneration for services rendered is actually the order of the day at the oft mentioned station hotel where an upfront of charge of five shillings is levied on all those wishing to use the bell boy for more than just moving the luggage. Unfortunately the price may soon spiral when he blackmails you with pictures of your illicit liaison. Meet Nicholas Beckett, a young man with a troubled past (also, a troubled present and a seemingly troubled future). His victim? Mrs Prentice, nymphomaniac wife to eminent and despised psychiatrist Dr Prentice – a man intimately acquainted with the mind of a lunatic and potentially in possession of one. His accuser? Dr Rance; more tapped than a brewhouse cellar and medical inspector from the government, ‘our immediate superiors in madness.’ The play takes place in Prentice’s consulting room, a space with the pre requisite number of entrances and hiding places for the fast action of this manic farce. Convenient, no? The set supports the action well and the fabulously tasteless period wallpaper makes clear in the mind the 1960’s setting (or invokes the living room of an elderly soap opera character.)
Accusations of impropriety, homosexuality, transvestitism, rape and just general madness are tossed about like the warmest of spuds as Rance adds to his litany of misdiagnoses and Prentice grows ever more desperate to hide his big secret. The secret that set this big old ball of crazy rolling. Freudian psychoanalysis may argue that the insanity shown stems from the stalling of a child’s development and a fixation in one of the psychosexual stages, but the truth here seems far more mundane, sex. From the curtain Dr Prentice has been trying to seduce Geraldine Barclay, a girl from the employment agency applying for the vacant position of Dr Prentice’s secretary. To avoid discovery she is put through an ordeal like no other at the hands of lunatics in lab coats. With the addition of a policeman (because... um, it’s a farce and there has to be? Stop asking difficult questions!) we have our cast and as the situation grows more dire each of their grips on reality and sanity grows more tenuous. We as an audience are even left questioning what is really happening.
Joe Orton’s plays courted controversy at the time and this one has not diminished since. While 50 years ago the appearance of naked and semi naked performers, crossdressing and violence may have been verging on the scandalous, we as a modern audience have grown quite comfortable with it. The scandal for us has therefore shifted and thus the play maintains its spot close to the knuckle not by the content but by some of its continuously used tropes, such as rape as a plot device. The play is a great example of farce and can still shock even now, but for me the real enjoyment lies in the language Orton uses, intelligent and absurd one liners tumble out one after the other to uproarious laughter. The growing sense of panic is tangible and we are never sure who is ever really in control of the situation or their faculties. It is a very difficult play to stage and perform and the cast and crew deserve all the credit they receive.
Divisive? Yes. Shocking? Yes. Funny? Yes. Go and see it! (But maybe ask little Timmy to sit this one out.)
