What Did the Butler See in Orton's What the Butler Saw?

What Did the Butler See in Orton's What the Butler Saw? MAURICE CHARNEY What the Butler Saw by Joe Orton (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. Like Stoppard in The ReallnspectorHound, Orton is parodying the whodunit conventions without actuaIJy writing a mystery story. We need the invisible butler in What the Butler Saw as a stand-in for the cozy and complacent amenities of upper-middle-class drawing-room life. Dr. Prentice's establishment is actually a private lunatic asylum, which Orton establishes in his epigraph as a microcosm of the world: "Surely we're all mad people, and they/Whom we think are, are not" (p. 361).' By invoking Cyril Toumeur's Jacobean play The Revenger's Tragedy (from about 1607), Orton is setting up. as a model one of the strangest and most extravagant of seventeenth-century black comedies, which is also a play much inHuenced by Shakespeare's Hamlet. It is a wildly, almost hysterically rhetorical play that passes for tragedy only by certain technicalities ofthe ending. Even better than The Jew of Malta, for which T.S. Eliot coined the term, it exemplifies all of the bizarre and unanticipatable shifts in tone that are associated with "tragic farce.,., What the Butler Saw is hardly tragic - it is, in fact, close to The Importance ofBeing Earnest both in style and plot (especially the lurid denouement) - but it plays with large concepts of identity (preferably sexual identity), incest, authority, and maintaining one's sanity in a mad world. These are all farcical themes with a certain natural relevance to tragedy. In his recent short book on Orton in Methuen's Contemporary Writers series, C.W.E. Bigsby calls Orton "the high priest of farce in the mid-sixties'" and points to his development of a new kind of farce: But it was Orton' s achievement to give farce a new meaning. to make it something more than the coy trysting with disorder it had once been. For Orton, farce became both an Orton's What the Butler Saw 497 expression of anarchy and its only antidote. In his play. role playing is not a series of false surfaces concealing a real self; it is the total meaning orunmeaning ofprotagonists who survive by refusing all substance. (p. 17) This is further defined in tenns of entropy: The protagonists ofthis new farce-world are therefore themselves marginal,irrelevant to the slow unwinding of an entropic process, white the form itself is self-destructive, implying the existence of no Platonic idea in the mad logic ofits own configurations. (p. 52) This is a different kind of farce from the comfortable, domestic assumptions of Plautus's New Comedy, where all the fonnulas are worked out to produce the happy ending and perturbations are merely a plot device. In Aristophanes' Old Comedy, the endings generally celebrate the triumph of a splendid wishfulfillment idea like peace, sexual bliss, and the values of Cloud Cuckooland. Orton's endings are sardonic. In Entertaining Mr. Sloane, the hoodlum picaro is, through murder, tamed into a bisexual stud forced to be shared between brother and sister. Loot ends with the bank robbers, the homicidal nurse, and the model detective from Scotland Yard parceling out the loot among themselves, while the honest but pompous widower, Mr. McLeavy, is conveniently framed and sent to prison. What the Butler Saw has an extraordinarily Dionysiac - or mock Dionysiac - ending, as Sergeant Match, clad only in the leopard-spotted dress of Mrs. Prentice and the god Hercules, leads all the characters on stage to an apocalyptic exit through the skylight: "They pick up their clothes and weary, bleeding, drugged and drunk, climb the rope ladder into the blazing light" (p. 448). Lahr sees in the action a "wink at Euripides,"4 whose Bacchae was the inspiration for Orton's bitter, adult-camp farce, The Erpingham Camp. Sergeant Match qualifies as spiritual guide by his remarkable discovery of...