SOURCE: "What Did the Butler See in Orton's 'What the Butler Saw?," in Modern Drama, Vol. XXV, No. 4, December, 1982, pp. 496-504.

In the following essay, Charney focuses on Joe Orton 's play What the Butler Saw as a black-comedy farce concerned with sexual identity and lurid sexual behavior.

What the Butler Saw by Joe Orton (written in 1967 and produced posthumously in 1969) is, of course, a farce without a butler, which should more properly have been called What the Butler Might Have Seen had there been a butler and had he been privileged to oversee the strange goings-on in Dr. Prentice's private clinic. Like Stoppard in The Real Inspector Hound, Orton is parodying the whodunit conventions without actually writing a mystery story. We need the invisible butler in What the Butler Saw as a stand-in for the cozy and complacent amenities of upper-middle-class drawing-room life. Dr. Prentice's establishment is...