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written by Joe Orton, directed by Jim Warren

Soulpepper Theatre Company, Young Centre, Toronto

August 25-September 18, 2010

Anyone who saw Soulpepper’s hilarious production of Joe Orton’s Loot last year, will be ecstatic that the company is presenting What the Butler Saw, often considered Orton’s greatest play, helmed by the same director, Jim Warren, and featuring two of the same cast members, Oliver Dennis and Nicole Underhay.  The show should have be a resounding success, but, judging from opening night, it didn’t come close to generating the laughter that Loot did.     

What went wrong?  Well, it certainly is not the play which is a kind of 1960s French farce crossed with the wit of The Importance of Being Earnest.  The play begins with psychiatrist Dr. Prentice (Blair Williams) interviewing Geraldine (Underhay) for a secretarial position and insisting that a complete physical examination is necessary to discover her “other talents.”  Just as he has the unclad girl recumbent on his couch, his domineering wife (Brenda Robins) bursts in with problems of her own.  Nicolas (Brandon McGibbon), a bellboy, is blackmailing her because of photos he took during their attempted sexual liaison.  Suddenly Dr. Rance (Graham Harley) drops in to investigate the state of Dr. Prentice’s clinic.  Prentice resorts to subterfuge and by the end of the play the four non-doctors, including a policeman (Dennis), have repeatedly stripped and swapped clothing in multiple combinations.  The play challenges all forms of authority, especially the right of anyone to decide what is “normal” in terms of sanity or sexuality.

Timing is paramount in farce and Warren’s pacing here is too lax right from the start nor does it build in tension.  Given the uniformly high calibre of the acting talent, this suggests not enough rehearsal time and too few previews to gauge audience reaction.  Orton knew that comedy is funniest when actors play it as dead serious, but here only Dennis and Harley catch the right tone.  The others play their roles too large but strangely suggest none of the sexual tension that fuels their characters’ actions.  Harley, who introduced the play to Toronto in 1976, makes Rance a modern, male Lady Bracknell, imperiously pontificating not about class distinction but sanity and sexuality, and just as oblivious to self-contradiction.  This may be the funniest English comedy between Earnest and Michael Frayn’s Noises Off (1982).  Let’s hope that over time this production will tighten up and get the rhythm right to work its audience to a frenzy as it should.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2010-08-26.

Photo: Nicole Underhay, Graham Harley.  ©Cylla von Tiedemann.