All good clean fun?  Don’t believe a word of it.

The first production of What The Butler Saw was in 1969, two years after Orton’s death.  That was a different world; England was emerging from decades of deference, strict propriety (for the many) and miserable austerity.  The Lord Chamberlain’s censorship was no more and the arts scene, at first tentatively and then rumbustiously, was like a pressure vessel with the valve suddenly opened.  Mary Whitehouse had not yet widened her remit to the stage, because she was far too busy cleaning up TV, but Disgusted of Tonbridge Wells had been very busily occupied during the 1960s with Lady Chatterley’s Lover and the plays of John Osborne and then came along this filthy farrago of obscenities, nudity, cross-dressing and wanton lechery.

It is not family entertainment.  

How could it be when set in a lunatic asylum masquerading as a psychiatric clinic, when the doctor in charge wishes his putative secretary to undress as part of the appointment interview and the visiting government inspector is crazier than any of the inmates?  Add a barmy bell-boy from the nearby hotel, a dipsomaniac wife and a potty policeman and you have a formula for helter-skelter farce, but with the piquancy of Joe Orton’s wicked social commentary and razor-blade one-liners.

Brighten up the dark days of January by seeing just as much as the butler ever saw.

Prick up your ears!! Ooooh, missus!

It is an unbelievable fifty years since Joe Orton burst upon the theatrical scene.  He was born in Leicester in 1933 and gravitated towards London where he attended RADA after taking voice lessons. He dismissed his two year course as "Rubbish" but met there his partner and nemesis, Kenneth Halliwell, and they moved in together,

Later they were both arrested and received a six-month sentence apiece for defacing books from Islington Public Library. These books became the most valued stock in the library when Orton became a household name. 

Away from Halliwell, Orton wrote a play, Entertaining Mr Sloane, which had a  production at the Arts Theatre before moving to Wyndham’s. This produced a newspaper reaction along the lines of "This dirty play should never have been seen in the West End". Orton fanned this publicity by writing against the play, using a pseudonym.

His subsequent plays included What The Butler Saw, which has been regarded as his triumph. When in the first production Ralph Richardson  was cast as Dr Rance, Orton  commented that he was far too old. One wonders whether Richardson was attempting to ally himself with the new school of writing as Olivier had done in John Osborne’s The Entertainer.

His plays at the time, however, were less famous than his personal life. In August 1967 Halliwell murdered Orton with a hammer, presumably while Orton was asleep before taking an overdose of sleeping pills. It was assumed that he had become insanely jealous of Orton’s success.                  

BILL  BRAY