SOURCE: Brustein, Robert. “Robert Brustein on Theater.” New Republic 200, no. 16 (17 April 1989): 34.

In the following excerpt from a review of two plays, Brustein comments that, in light of the shock value of contemporary entertainment, Orton's work seems less outrageous than it once did.

An example of [unrealized promise] is currently on view at the Manhattan Theatre Club in Joe Orton's What the Butler Saw. Orton, who died at 34, was notable for taking the traditional conventions of farce and burlesque and liberating their underground meanings. Sensitive to the sexual and aggressive connotations of the most inoffensive-seeming gags, and particularly fond of the comic possibilities of transvestism, he gained something of a dangerous reputation by daring to make these manifest. But an age that has experienced Camp, the Theater of the Ridiculous, Ethyl Eichelberger, and Monty Python, not to mention Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy's Raw, is likely to find Orton...