I enjoyed this play so much that I couldn’t be offended. To those who haven’t lived through the 1960s and 1970s, it will appear to be wrong on so many levels. So much is laughed at that no playwright would dare to ask us to laugh at now.
But the acting is superb. Each one of the cast has immaculate comic timing. Directed by Michael Cabot, it is extremely slick. The witty lines come fast and furious. The colourful set by Bek Palmer is gloriously surreal and evokes the period.
And, strangely, though this a farce and all the characters are a parody, in the up-side-down world created, they are somehow believable. I did care about them.
Written in 1966, the year before practicing homosexuality stopped being a criminal offence, the play (rather like the sad fate of its author – who was bludgeoned to death by his gay lover the following year) takes a sledge hammer to the sacred.
A young woman (so nicely played by Alana Jackson) is being interviewed for a job as secretary to the predatory psychiatrist Dr Prentice (played with great elan by John Dorney). He asks her to take her clothes off on a pretext as flimsy as her underwear.
Enter his wife, Mrs Prentice played by Holly Smith –too young to have seen live the 1960s actress Fenella Fielding whose voice and demeanour exemplified the sexual siren of the day – but she brings her to life marvellously in a performance which should more than once have had its own round of applause as she left the stage.
Mrs Prentice tells us she has been happily seduced by a bellboy in The Station Hotel. Indeed, the young man turns up requiring £100 in exchange for some compromising photographs.
After that it’s all about characters changing clothes, men dressed as women, women dressed as men – Alex Cardall as the bell boy plays multiple parts.
An insane inspector, Dr Rance from some institution which supervises psychiatrists, is played by Jack Lord in an apoplectic frenzy.
While nearly everyone runs around crossed-dressed and regularly hiding from at least one other character. Dr Rance misdiagnoses the rest as having suffered childhood trauma, they are unaware of and deny.
Even the unfortunate police sergeant (Michael Hugo) who is summoned to investigate crimes which haven’t actually taken place, is persuaded to take off all his clothes.
Yes, the whole thing is absolutely barmy and in the worst possible taste. It makes fun at the expense of Sir Winston Churchill – the national hero who had died only a year before.
The police and the Cabinet are not spared but no one will mind about that.
Photo © Sheila Burnett
The language is ingenious. No one speaks in common parlance; the script is mostly the type of formal phrasing that you expect to hear in court. That’s one of the reasons it is so funny.
Everyone’s twisted logic, particularly of the misdiagnoses of Dr Rance, is both a parody of the psychiatrist’s profession – and the social mores of the day.
This play is not to be taken seriously. It is a farce, but in this production by London Classic Theatre it is a piece of theatre much to be admired for its machine gun pace, its spot-on choreography, and its superb delivery of clever lines.
What the Butler Saw is at Cambridge Arts Theatre until Saturday, July 20, then touring.
