The laughs come fast and furious in Center Theater Group’s revival of Joe Orton’s 1967 sex farce, What the Butler Saw, now in a holiday run at the Mark Taper Forum. Directed by John Tillinger, an Orton expert (Loot and Entertaining Mr Sloane at the Taper), Butler pokes rude, wicked fun at psychiatry, the police, marriage, publishing, nymphomania, religion and even Winston Churchill during the course of its madcap story. The play also showcases Orton’s verbal prowess; there are epigrammatic one-liners galore plus jokes, puns and insults, all on the outrageous side.
The setting is a psychiatric clinic run by Dr. Prentice (Charles Shaughnessy), a horny shrink who sets the madness in motion by insisting that Geraldine (Sarah Manton), the young woman he’s interviewing for a secretarial job, strip naked for him. The blissfully naive Geraldine thinks this is a bit odd but complies anyway, retiring behind a screen. Then Mrs. Prentice (Frances Barber) suddenly bursts into the room. Clad in just a fur coat and slip, the sex-crazed woman claims that the hotel bellhop (Angus McEwan) who just “raped” her is now trying to blackmail her with the intimate snapshots he took of the episode. At the Doctor’s urging she slips into Geraldine’s dress, thereby touching off a series of ensuing mistaken identities which keep building in complexity and hilarity.
Transvestism is part and parcel of this classically British and campy play, all of whose characters are pushed beyond normal restraints, causing reason to give way to panic.
Dr. Rance (Paxton Whitehead), the government medical inspector who arrives to restore order in this madhouse is, of course, the craziest of them all, reminiscent of Groucho’s Dr Quackenbush.
To be successful, farce depends not only on hyper-fast action (and skillful juggling of plot twists) but a cast skilled at making the anarchy seem real. The six actors in What the Butler Saw are certainly up to the challenge; led by the masterful work of Frances Barber (a classically trained British actress), they keep the action moving and the audience laughing from start to finish.
