THERE are quite a few similarities between Joe Orton’s What the Butler Saw and Alan Bennett’s Habeas Corpus, as there are about the background of the two authors, born within a year of one another. Both plays contain farcical elements using comedy to expose what the authors see as hypocrisy among the medical profession that creates a respectable gloss which covers dishonesty.

Just four years separate the first production of the plays, What the Butler Saw in 1969 and Habeas Corpus in 1973, but there is a world of difference in the style of writing.

Still smarting from the end of theatre censorship and decriminalisation of homosexuality, which came about almost simultaneously with Orton’s savage 1967 murder by his partner, there is still a great deal of the angry young man to be found in Orton’s cynical and provocative script. Not for him the subtler understated comedy to be found in Bennett’s script.

But the targets have moved and changed a great deal in the 50-plus years since those opening nights, leaving What the Butler Saw looking more like an outright farce and Habeas Corpus a comedy with farcical elements. The popularity of farce has also waned considerably since the heydays of the great Aldwych and Whitehall teams of farceurs, leaving London Classic Theatre director Michael Cabot with the problem of how to treat Orton’s play as an out and out farce, without losing the author’s barbed attacks on middle-class hypocrisy.

Making excellent use of designer Bek Palmer’s Monty Pythonesque pop art set and costumes, he whips the cast into a positive frenzy of activity and fast-moving dialogue chasing comedy. But whether it is the change in comedy fashion or a need for a few more considered moments, the production does not generate as many laughs as the efforts of the hard working cast deserve. And with the element of the ability to scandalise and shock audiences as it did in the 1960s lost, those attacks on the blinkered middle-classes have also lost their edge.

Thanks, however, to a cast who chase every laugh with tremendous determination, swopping clothes and identities at the drop of a hat, there is still a great deal of fun to enjoy. Watch John Dorney’s would-be lecherous Dr Prentice, Alana Jackson as his bemused victim, Geraldine Barclay, Holly Smith as his neglected wife seeking solace and comfort in alcohol, failed blackmailer Alex Cardall, whose Page Boy outfit is handed around like a bag of sweets, leaving him to adopt a series of different guises, Jon-Paul Rowden’s put-upon local bobby and Jack Lord’s senior psychiatrist Dr Rance, trying to make each fast changing situation fit his already-formed opinion, as they leave no stone unturned in their quest for humour. With ten of the 16 venues still to go on their nationwide tour, future audiences can probably also look forward to more comic business developing.

GRP

 

Photographs by Sheila Burnett