Why is there no Butler in What the Butler Saw?

Hi there - I'm currently in Raleigh for Arts Day (click the link and get involved! we need you!), but wanted to share something from our Managing Director Amanda. I'll be back in Asheville tonight for the Butler performance - I think there are a few tickets left if you haven't seen it! - Charlie


If you've seen our current production of What the Butler Saw, I'm sure you quickly realized that there is no actual butler in Butler. So why the title?

"What the butler saw" refers to a type of peep-show that was common in Britain in the early part of the 20th Century. Essentially, it's early pornography. The viewer looked through a small peephole (or perhaps a keyhole) at a series of photos of a woman undressing - as if he were a butler spying on his mistress.

Here's a photo of an actual "what the butler saw" machine, from Wikipedia (photo by Linda Spashett). If you'd like to see the photos inside, you can do your own Google search!

Joe Orton chose the title deliberately, knowing that it would immediately remind his audience of the voyeuristic peep-show.

Or, as the really excellent website joeorton.org says: "What the Butler Saw appalled and enraged certain audiences with its blatant sexual overtones, attacks on authority and conventional morality via its invitation to view other people’s sexuality and sexual identity from the position of voyeur."

One audience member hit the nail on the head when she told me after the show, "So there is a butler in What the Butler Saw. It's us."

So I'm over at Usual Suspects having a drink with Ron Bashford, the director of What the Butler Saw, a few nights ago after a designer run through. It was a rough run-through, what they call a "stumble through" (and in our case that night at some points, a blunder-through) but a lot of the humor came through and a lot of the subversive elements as well. And then Ron and I started talking about the playwright, Joe Orton, and Ron filled me in on some really interesting facts about Orton. I asked him to write some of them down so I could post them in our blog.

Check out the interesting background information below and then get tickets to Butler I. recommend next Friday May 14th, which includes a talkback with the cast after the show.

And I love this 1967 interview with Orton. Cheeky!



If the above video doesn't work for you, see the original at YouTube.


Joe Orton contributed to an exciting working class arts movement that swept through Great Britain in the 1960s. Orton was born in Leicester, England in 1933, and won a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in 1951. A promiscuous and openly gay man at a time when homosexuality was actively persecuted by the police, in the mid-1960s Orton was the rising star of an ‘alternative British intelligentsia’. Jailed for the creative defacing of library books, Orton brought his unique perspective and experience with persecution to unveiling the corruption behind the legal, class and religious systems of his time, fearlessly paving the way for other artists to use unconventional humor and diverse understanding to the liberalization of British society.

Orton was murdered by his lover in 1967. What The Butler Saw is Orton's last play, a cross-dressing sex farce set in a psychiatric hospital. Until 1968, plays in Great Britain were officially censored by the Lord Chamberlain. In his work, Orton cleverly undermined efforts to censor his work by using physical humor, double entendres, and seemingly absurd characters who reflect the underlying hypocrisy of the time. What The Butler Saw also goes beyond the limitations of conventional sex farce by hilariously exposing the psychological confusion created by powerful people in their attempts to normalize the behavior of others of differing social, political and sexual backgrounds. Orton's plays are both challenging and generous: he combined insight into his own culture with his desire to undermine societal forces that inhibited personal freedom.

Although we now think of the 1960s as a period of liberalization, Orton was ahead of his time. It was not until a 1975 revival of What The Butler Saw at London's Royal Court Theatre, that the play was truly recognized as a work of genius, several years after an expurgated version of the play was presented on Broadway. Even the Beatles, who broke so many class and artistic barriers, wouldn't follow through with the plan to appear in the screenplay Orton wrote for them, in which the Fab Four appear in bed together at the end!

The website www.joeorton.org has lots of additional information on Orton.