What the Butler Saw

This is one of those all too rare opportunities to see a performance of a Joe Orton play. But be warned, it is not for the faint-hearted!

Joe Orton delighted in challenging the audience of the sixties. His plays put sexuality back on stage in all its exuberant, amoral and ruthless excess.

"Joe Orton's last play, What the Butler Saw, will live to be accepted as a comedy classic of English literature" (Sunday Telegraph)

The chase is on in this breakneck comedy of licensed insanity, from the moment when Dr Prentice, a psychoanalyst interviewing a prospective secretary, instructs her to undress. The plot of What the Butler Saw contains enough twists and turns, mishaps and changes of fortune, coincidences and lunatic logic to furnish three or four conventional comedies. But however the six characters in search of a plot lose the thread of the action - their wits or their clothes - their verbal self-possession never deserts them.

In What the Butler Saw, Orton's scintillating final play (written just before his brutal death in 1967), we see clearly that: ‘His laughter was etched in the despair, isolation and violence of modern life and offered instead of stasis the more apt metaphor of frantic activity. Farce allowed Orton to make a spectacle of disintegration… man ‘dummying up’ a destiny in a meaningless world by making panic look like reason.’

Director, Stephen Lee is, perhaps, one of the few directors in Australia who has the talent and staging skills necessary to take, and maintain, control of this Orton classic. He has assembled a fine cast who, guided by his skilful direction will have you rolling in the aisles, totally outraged and perplexed, by what is still a shocking and brilliant play!

A community theatre production by The Graduate Dramatic Society by special arrangement with Dominie Pty Ltd

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