Intelligent Farce

Last night to the Vaudeville Theatre to see Joe Orton's What The Butler Saw. It's a production that has received mixed reviews, with the better-known press criticising it for being too high-octane throughout.

That's not a judgement I share. This farce was perfectly pitched and the high energy appropriate to a world in which everyone who is sane is thought to be mad and those who are mad are the only ones deemed to be sane. From the moment Dr Prentice (Tim McInnerny) persuades prospective secretary Geraldine Barclay (Georgia Moffett) to take off her clothes to the denoument in which - no, I won't spoil it - through various cross-dressings, very tasteful male nudity (Nick Hendrix) and less tasteful references to white golliwogs and Sir Winston Churchill, the laughs never stop, propelled either by Orton's masterful use of language or the physical comedy. The only aspect of the production that grated was the gratuitous display of rubber manhood which not only revealed what would have been funny if it had been kept hidden, but which was so obviously not the manhood of steel that it was supposed to portray.

So why hasn't this play been more successful? (Once again it was a production that the Other Half and I saw on the cheap rather than at full price as the producers tried to fill the theatre.) I partly blame the reviews - which I put down to the fact that critics get into the habit of watching plays from a particular angle and often review what they expect to see rather than what they do see.

But some shows survive the worst of reviews - Wicked is a case in point - and I suspect that a large part of the problem is that Orton, for all his physical comedy and running about, is too intelligent a playwright for the average citizen in the 2010s. The ideas that he throws out in almost all his plays, challenging the prejudices and preconceptions of his age, particularly around sex and hypocrisy, come so thick and fast that you need to listen carefully to understand them. (This is the point at which I should come up with several examples of the jokes but I do not have a copy of the text. Sincere apologies.) Orton combines both broad farce, which we British from Brian Rix to Little Britain do very well, with intelligence, which we seem to find more difficult to bring into comedy. Compare the US, where they have limited success with farce, but where intelligent comedy, at least on television - think Frasier and The Big Bang Theory - is much more common.

I'm thinking aloud, and maybe thinking erroneously. I'd be interested to hear others' opinions on comedy and why Orton is not as well appreciated as he should be.