WHAT THE BUTLER SAW COURT THEATRE
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The play is packed with sex and violence—elements that director Sean Graney brings to the fore at Court Theatre. Like Orton, Graney, a leading figure on Chicago’s fringe-theater scene, enjoys pushing the envelope; he shocked critics and audiences last year with the dark comedy he wrote and directed, Porno. Graney’s rendition of Orton’s last work is loud, brash, raunchy, sometimes messy, often very funny, and always creative. It revels in the rude humor and angry cruelty of an artist aptly described by his biographer, John Lahr, as “a voluptuary of fiasco.”
Set in the examination room of a psychiatric clinic in suburban London, What the Butler Saw concerns a middle-aged, middle-class couple—Dr. and Mrs. Prentice—seeking furtive encounters with attractive youths (the betrayal of the young by their parents’ generation is a key Orton theme). Dr. Prentice is the head of the clinic and a pill-popping premature ejaculator; his sex-starved wife is the token heterosexual member of a lesbian “coven.” (“I myself am exempt,” she informs her husband, “because you count as a woman.”) Dr. Prentice attempts to seduce naive Geraldine Barclay, who’s applying for a secretarial position, by having her undress so he can perform a bogus medical examination. But coitus is interrupted by the unexpected arrival of Mrs. Prentice. She’s recently dallied with hotel bellboy Nicholas Beckett, who’s now trying to blackmail her. (Male exploitation of women is another fundamental issue in the play.)
Graney has given a contemporary hyped-up energy to the mix. He’s taken some liberties with the text, altering dated political and cultural allusions, and added sight gags. When Geraldine takes off her stockings at Dr. Prentice’s request, Graney has her repeatedly flash the audience. Nicholas’s tight briefs are obscenely, outlandishly padded in front, while Sergeant Match’s underpants are festooned with toy tigers—an extension, perhaps, of his leopard-print dress (an allusion to the animal skin worn by Dionysus, and a costume suggested by Halliwell).
