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CAST LIST Dr Prentice....................Michael Harding Mrs Prentice......................Jo-Anne Kaye Nick.....................................Dave Hossack Geraldine.................................Nicola Swan Dr Rance..............................Stephen Green Police Sgt....................Caine Folkes-Miller DIRECTOR.......................Richard Fawcett |
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| If you’re not familiar with the work
of Joe Orton, you really need to get out more. You can
get something of his flavour by looking at the licence
issued by the Lord Chamberlain in 1967 for Loot, a
show that requires, among other things, a dead female
spouse (ie. A corpse) and a coffin. It could be
performed, the Lord Chamberlain decreed, on condition
that the corpse was inanimate and not played by a woman.
And the word buggary must be amended to beggary.
Doesn’t it just buggar belief? So what happens in What the Butler Saw? Eh.....nothing actually, merely chaos in a madhouse. In the principal doctor’s consulting room, Geraldine has come for an interview but instead of getting the secretary’s job, ends up naked, shaven and sedated. The doctor’s wife, Mrs Prentice, has spent the better – or worse – part of the previous night in a hotel linen cupboard with a pageboy and proceeds to drink her way out of trauma. The pageboy, Nick, turns up to black-mail Mrs Prentice and dresses in Geraldine’s abandoned clothing. Unsurprisingly, this supposedly medical institution needs to be inspected, and the role of Dr Rance is to do just that – it is altogether incidental that he should prove to be in addition an obsessive sexual fantasist. Dr Prentice, undone by lust or rather the failure to achieve its object, is nominally in charge of the whole nightmare, and the policeman (as you might guess) is pursuing an enquiry into the mysterious disappearance of Winston Churchill’s genitals. Admittedly, this does not really explain how he comes to be dressed as Mrs Prentice. And, if that were not sufficient, Orton chooses to make his play a farce, so it’s also incredibly funny. Even more outrageous than when first written (because of PC), Orton’s play requires fine players, and those we have. Mike Harding and Dave Hossack should require no introduction to you. Caine Folkes-Miller appears with us for the third time, following Out of Order and Rumpelstiltskin. If you missed Our Country’s Good, you will have missed many good things including Stephen Green. Nicola Swan, one of our current crop of outstanding teenagers, played most recently with First Call in Blithe Spirit and with SDS in Inspector Hound and The 15 minute Hamlet. And last, but far from least, a real find: Jo-Anne Kaye, who stepped in to help with Annie last year and then travelled miles and miles to audition for Butler. Richard Fawcett |
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