Main Edition
US
FR
What The Butler Saw (Don Kelsen/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)
I witnessed a mildly Ortonesque moment at the Seven Dials Playhouse the other night. The theatre has recently rebranded the men’s and women’s toilets as “gender-neutral”, meaning that punters of both sexes are invited to play a little game if they wish to relieve themselves. The two doors bear identical labels, but one leads to a cramped and pungent cubbyhole with urinals next to the sinks, whereas the other leads to a spacious and relatively luxurious area complete with individual cubicles. It’s a variation on the old “Monty Hall Problem”. Audience members must pick a door and take their chances, and those who guess wisely are rewarded with a more pleasant experience.
Minutes before the show was due to begin, a flustered woman emerged from one of these doors exclaiming angrily that there were “men pissing in front of everyone”. Given that the show we were about to watch was Diary of a Somebody, John Lahr’s 1986 adaptation of Joe Orton’s diaries, I couldn’t help but wonder who Orton’s targets might be in the context today’s eternally baffling culture wars. Would it be the kind of woman who was clearly upset at having to wash her hands in full view of male genitalia, or would it be the authorities at the theatre who expect her to do so and would presumably brand her a “transphobe” or a “bigot” should she complain?
This revival of Diary of a Somebody includes a running joke delivered by Mrs Edna Welthorpe, an alter-ego of Orton who would write to the press and to theatres in the late Sixties to complain about his plays. She emerges from time to time at a window on the upstage wall, a kind of choric figure expostulating on the evils of our hero. Her words are lifted verbatim from the letters that Orton dispatched under her name. For instance, her letter to the Telegraph described Entertaining Mr Sloane (1964) as an “endless parade of mental and physical perversion”.
Such satire feels more relevant than ever when one considers how the new puritans of “Critical Social Justice” often give the impression of emulating Mrs Edna Welthorpe, with all their talk of how libraries ought to be “decolonised”, their pruning of supposedly offensive comedy shows on streaming services, and their attacks on “problematic” representations in art and literature. In this, Orton had an advantage over the satirists of our time. While he was lauded for lampooning the establishment and breaking taboos, writers who do so today are likely to be chastised by critics and the doyens of the industry for failing to toe the line.
Consider the responses to the West End revival of Jez Butterworth’s award-winning Jerusalem. “Should the play be revived?” writes playwright Bea Roberts. “I’m not sure. I read the script again recently and there’s a lot that feels dated: the laddish chat about ‘birds’ and the racial references… I understand it’s a safe bet for producers, this big, much-loved hit — and I loved it too. But at a time when theatre is grappling with questions of diversity and representation after Black Lives Matter, and when we’re seeing the rise of nationalism post-Brexit, doing a play about defending the homeland and Englishness seems ill-judged.”
Roberts is far from alone in her belief that it is the responsibility of the dramatist to reinforce voguish and ephemeral trends. It seems unlikely that a work as genuinely subversive as Orton’s What the Butler Saw (1967) would ever be commissioned by a major theatre in the current climate. Early drafts would require a thorough going-over by a “sensitivity reader”, and doubtless a director with concerns about how theatrical productions ought to send the “correct message” would mangle whatever glimmers of genius remained.
I’m exaggerating, but only slightly. I have spoken to actors who have found that valuable rehearsal time is often now occupied with interrogating the morality behind the texts, and how the first session begins with each cast member declaring their preferred pronouns. Many avid theatregoers have been turned off because so many productions feel more like sermons than works of art. Critics in the mainstream press are now regularly assessing drama on the putative “message” of the piece, or whether or not they approve of the way in which characters are represented. The star-rating system has always been fatuous, but is especially so if marks are docked for insufficiently diverse casting.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
SubscribeWhat a wonderful piece. When I’m feeling blue, I look up the images of the books which Orwell and Halliwell defiled. They never fail to reduce me to tears of laughter. http://www.joeorton.org/Pages/Joe_Orton_Gallery14.html
What a great piece . This is why I took the part of Edna. Who incidentally also uses those toilets & emerges equally fluttered . Haha. Thanks for your insight into the genius that was Joe.
Good article, thank you. From the 70s/80s onwards British theatre as been dominated by the ideological left – Barker, Brenton, Hare, Churchill, Stafford-Clark etc, etc. LIkewise, they would only want to work with individuals who were immersed in the same echo chambers as themselves. And like today, when the message is more important than the quality of work, the result is poor writing: putting people off from the theatre or reading pc novels.
Remember that Orton was an admitted child rapist so he may well not have been on the same side of the debate now that you assume he would.
Paedophiles will often take up whatever politics are most likely to enable their offending.
In the 70s and 80s that was liberalism and their individualism, now it’s wokeism and their censorship.
Yes he was a vile individual with the behaviours of a child, seen as ‘cool’ or ‘courageous’ by those who weren’t subject to them, like voyeurs at an orgy.
Very true. I remember watching ‘p***k Up Your Ears’ in a cinema at the time of its release. The majority of those present found it very funny when Orton and Halliwell are messing around with Arab boys in (I think) Morocco and Orton tells Halliwell how ready they are to give blow jobs. It seems that there are plenty of people who are prepared to forgive one of their own when it comes to abusing children. Especially if they are boys and of another race.
Well done for pointing this out. I have seen some of Mr Orton’s works; they are made to shock and so often don’t as the play-goers are expecting it. It’s not so much the subject matter that I find distastful as the fact that there are rarely (if ever) any characters with whom I can sympathise; therefore, the plays become intellectual exercises in just how far can a playwrite go, rather than revealing anything about the human condition or society.
Thankfully we still have David Mamet, as alive and observant as ever. His 1992 play, Oleanna, was subsequently made into a movie with William H. Macy. It was a harbinger of the woke victim SJW times in which we now all live.
Excellent article, esp. about toilets. The Bouc Blanc restaurant on the ski slopes above Courchevel has a single toilet with 2 urinals on the left-hand wall as you go in and 2 cubicles on the wall facing you. If you are happy to use the urinals and one is free you walk past the queue of people waiting for a cubicle, but the ladies in it don’t bat an eyelid, probably because you’d have to make quite an effort to see any genitalia of whatever type of the users of said urinals.
Pretty standard to see mixed toilets in France – sometimes with a flimsy partition between urinals and cubicles.