Abstract
What the Butler Saw (written in 1967 and produced posthumously in 1969) is, of course, a farce without a butler, which should more properly have been called What the Butler Might Have Seen had there been a butler and had he been privileged to oversee the strange goings-on in Dr Prentice’s private clinic. We need the invisible butler in What the Butler Saw as a stand-in for the cosy and complacent amenities of upper-middle-class drawing-room life. Incidentally, Orton saw a butler for the first time in his life on 24 January 1967, when he visited the Beatles, well after the first draft of this play was written (Lahr, p. 245).
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John Russell Taylor speaks slightingly of Orton’s knowledge of ‘how to put a play together in the manner of the moment without going too far and worrying Aunt Edna’ (in the Penguin Plays collection that contains Entertaining Mr. Sloane; New English Dramatists, Vol. 8, p. 13). Orton knows how to titillate Aunt Edna without outraging her. Entertaining Mr. Sloane fitted only too well into the controversy about ‘dirty plays’ raging in London around 1964. See Pamela Hansford Johnson’s novel, Cork Street, Next to the Hatters: A Novel in Bad Taste (London: Macmillan, 1965), in which a scurrilous and pornographic play that resembles Sloane is being staged. See also her reflections on the moral climate of the Moors murders, On Iniquity (London: Macmillan, 1967). The most outspoken of the moral attacks on Orton is by Martin Esslin in ‘Joe Orton: The Comedy of (Ill) Manners’ (Contemporary English Drama, ed. C. W. E. Bigsby, New York: Holmes & Meier, 1981, pp. 93–107). It is puzzling why Esslin should choose to write on a dramatist whom he so violently loathes socially, morally and personally, as in the following: Orton’s rage is purely negative, it is unrelated to any positive creed, philosophy or programme of social reform .... he articulates, in a form of astonishing elegance and eloquence, the same rage and helpless resentment which manifests itself in the wrecked trains of football supporters, the mangled and vandalized telephone kiosks and the obscene graffitti on lavatory walls. Orton, one might say, gives the inarticulate outcries of football hooligans the polished form of Wildean aphorisms. (p. 96) Behind Esslin’s own rage is the intensely snobbish conviction that Joe Orton is a ‘yob’, who expresses the rage of the socially and educationally under-privileged: having risen from the working classes of an ill-educated mass society that has lost all the religious and moral values of earlier centuries and has been debauched by the consumerism of a system manipulated by the mass media, Orton exemplifies the spiritual emptiness and — in spite of his obvious brilliance and intelligence — the thoughtlessness, the inability to reason and to analyse, of these deprived multitudes. (p. 107) Esslin is the most articulate spokesman for the many respectable persons in Britain who were deeply outraged and affronted by Orton’s plays, and, in a metadramatic sense, we seem to be listening to the voice of Mr McLeavy in Loot.
‘Joe Orton Interviewed by Giles Gordon’, p. 96.
Throughout his career Orton was enamoured of the condensed, double-take paradoxes of Lewis Carroll. In his interview with Simon Trussler, for example, Orton opened with the Alice-in-Wonderland declaration: ‘I hate all animals with tails’; Alice might have said just the opposite.
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© 1984 Maurice Charney
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Charney, M. (1984). What Did the Butler See in ‘What the Butler Saw’?. In: Joe Orton. Macmillan Modern Dramatists. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-17565-9_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-17565-9_7
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