The resolution of Joe Orton's What the Butler Saw

Abstract

Joe Orton declared in 1965 that ‘farce is higher than comedy in that it is very close to tragedy’. It was his aim to reanimate the genre of farce and forge it into an instrument of social critique, and this paper shows how he did that. As the title suggests, What the Butler Saw (1969) is a peepshow, in which the audience are voyeurs seeing into an anarchic universe, which exposes the greed, sexuality and violence lying under the surface of middle-class British life. In Bergson's terms, this play is a ‘snowball farce’. At the climax of the anarchy, metal grilles fall into place – not to isolate the patients in the wards of the mental hospital where the play is set, but over the doors of Dr. Prentice's office, trapping all but one of the supposedly sane characters. The action of the play is then resolved in a short but extraordinary final scene. It comprises (1) a recognition between long-lost relatives, which parodies this familiar comic ending by adding an Oedipal twist; (2) a deus ex machina; (3) an Aristophanic revelation; (4) the closing departure. Each of these four phases is analysed briefly, and in the light of this analysis a challenge will be mounted to Leslie Smith's view that ‘the ending reasserts the “real” world we all live in after the fantasy-reality of Dr Prentice's office’. This reading, while prima facie attractive, fails to do justice to the full meaning of the play.