What the Butler Saw

“Two young people – one mad, one sexually insatiable, and both naked – are roaming this asylum. At all costs, we must prevent a collision!” So says Dr. Rance in Joe Orton’s outrageous and satiric farce, What the Butler Saw, directed by Stephen Wisker. Set in a posh British insane asylum, Orton’s play, still shocking nearly forty years after it premiered, thumbs its nose at authority, repression, social mores and the very form of farce itself. A combination of Fawlty Towers and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, the play is razor sharp and hysterical, and frighteningly relevant to the irrational politics of contemporary America. As the doctor says, “You can’t be a rationalist in an irrational world.”