Joe Orton and the Redefinition of Farce

Author(s): Joan F. Dean

Source: Theatre Journal , Dec., 1982, Vol. 34, No. 4 (Dec., 1982), pp. 481-492
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3206810

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 Joe Orton and the Redefinition of Farce
Joan F. Dean

The Classical critics, from Aristotle to Horace, were puzzled to understand

why a disorganized ribald farce like the satyr-play should be the source of
tragedy, though they were clear that it was.
- Northrop Frye

The critical prejudice against farce as an intellectually and artistically valid dra-
matic genre is probably as old as the word itself. "Farce" derives from the Latin verb
farcire, meaning "to stuff"; its etymology recalls its early use as referring to an ampli-
fication, often impromptu and buffoonish, of medieval church liturgy. Writing
about Italian comedy of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, K. M. Lea epito-
mizes critics who suggest the intrinsic inferiority of farce as a dramatic genre: "Farce
is comedy reduced to commercialism. The best farce is what gives the maximum of
amusement for the minimum of intellectual efforts."i This persistent critical bias
against farce also underlies Barbara Cannings's criteria for identifying farce:

The vital question to ask, then, is: 'What is this play about?' And it is safe to say that if it
is about people it is a farce, whereas if it is about political, historical or religious ideas, if
its significance is symbolic rather than personal, or if it is merely a display of verbal pyro-
technics, it is not a farce.2

Cannings's attempt to distinguish farce from medieval debat, parody, and sotie pro-
duces an extreme generalization, but like many critics she assumes that farce is pri-
marily an entertainment not to be taken seriously. In writing specifically about the

Joan F. Dean is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Missouriz Kansas City,
where she teaches Renaissance and modern drama. She is the author of Tom Stoppard: Comedy
as a Moral Matrix (1981), and has previously published in Modern Drama, and The Journal of
Popular Film.

1 K. J. Lea, Italian Popular Comedy: A Study in the Commedia dell'Arte 1520-1620 with Special Refer-
ence to the English Stage. (1934, reprint ed., New York: Russell and Russell, 1962), I, 185.
2 Barbara Cannings, 'Towards a Definition of Farce as a Literary 'Genre,' " Modem Language Review,
56 (1961), 560.

481

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482 / TJ, December 1982

works of Joe Orton, Simon Shepherd evinces a similar critical aversion to farce: "To
perpetuate the belief that [Orton's] plays are merely rather outrageous farces is ...
to tuck them behind the proscenium and silence them."3 Even the Oxford English
Dictionary in its definition of farce as "a dramatic work (usually short) which has for
its sole object to excite laughter" confirms the critical prejudice against farce.

Another basis for the disparaging use of the term farce is the belief that such plays
are populated by caricatures rather than fully drawn, well-developed characters
capable of growth and change. The prevailing assumption is that the farceur is not
so much unwilling as unable to create three-dimensional characters. The gross phys-
ical action and slapstick violence of farce seem better suited to simple, readily identi-
fiable characters than to complex or sophisticated ones. Consequently, some defini-
tions of farce emphasize the inferior social, economic, or intellectual status of its
characters. From the time of the fabula Atellena, farce has been linked with buf-
foons, rustic yokels, and lower-class characters- characters who populate what
Mikhail Bakhtin, in writing about Rabelais, describes as "a boundless world of hu-
morous forms and manifestations opposed to the official and serious tone of me-
dieval ecclesiastical and feudal culture."* Even in the works of Shakespeare, Moliere,
and Wilde, the inhabitants of the best households behave primitively, ludicrously,
or even impolitely - thereby severing the link between man's economic status and
his potential for farcical or ridiculous behavior. But in modern drama, farce fre-
quently crosses economic lines to acknowledge the mechanistic or animalistic nature
potential in all men. Absurdist theatre, as in the plays of Beckett and Ionesco, also
stresses the psychology that reduces man to an animal or a machine; so does silent-
film comedy. Especially in the twentieth century, farce cuts across class barriers to
show that any one might act barbarically.

Among recent critics of farce as a dramatic genre, Eric Bentley and Leonard C.
Pronko are especially important. Bentley's famous defense of farce, "The Psychol-
ogy of Farce," cogently argues for the genre's primitive vitality and psychological
validity.

Farce in general offers a special opportunity: shielded by delicious darkness and seated in
warm security, we enjoy the privilege of being totally passive while on stage our most
treasured unmentionable wishes are fulfilled before our imagination. In that application
of the formula which is bedroom farce, we savor the adventure of adultery, ingeniously
exaggerated in the highest degree, and all without taking the responsibility or suffering
the guilt.S

3 Simon Shepherd, "Edna's Last Stand, or Joe Orton's Dialectic of Entertainment," Renaissance and
Modem Studies, 22 (1978), 95-96.
SMikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Cambridge: M. I. T. Press, 1968),
p. 4.
5 Eric Bentley, The Life of the Theatre (New York: Atheneum, 1967), p. 229. Bentley's essay "The Psy-
chology of Farce," first appeared in The New Republic 6 January 1958, pp. 17-19, and 13 January 1958,
pp. 17-19.

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483 / JOE ORTON AND FARCE

Pronko's study of Feydeau records the connection between Feydeau's farces and the
theatre of the absurd, and, like Bentley, stresses the darker side of human nature
suggested by farce:

Lurking beneath the frenetically joyous surface, however, is a vision of the world in ex-
plosion which was to go almost unnoticed until the mid-twentieth century - a vision
which gives depth and bite to comedies and farces which might otherwise have perished
along with the halcyon days they depict.6

In Feydeau's work, Pronko recognizes the possibility that farce can accommodate a
vision of man's animality and selfishness. In the works of Joe Orton this possibility
was fully realized.

The dark side of the comic vision, the side explored by Orton, has its own prece-
dents and traditions among both playwrights and theorists. The plays of Aristo-
phanes, Euripides, Shakespeare, Jonson, Moliere, and Congreve all consider man's
potentially limitless animality, lust, greed, and selfishness. As their subjects, these
dramatists take areas of human experience often considered beyond the limits of art,
let alone the conventions of their genres: those unbounded realms of Dionysiac
frenzy, anarchy, and even nihilism. In pursuing these subjects, these playwrights
frequently expand or redefine the boundaries of their genre-sometimes bursting
them completely. For Aristophanes, as Cedric Whitman observes, "bawdry ...
serves merely to illustrate vividly the poet's devotion to the limitless, that kind of
world view which . . . is almost the exact opposite of what we term morality.
Boundlessness itself, one might say, is the essence of the Aristophanean comic im-
pulse. .. ."7 Similarly, glimpses of the limitless potential of man can be seen in Eurip-
ides's The Bacchae, Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, Jonson's Volpone, Moliere's
The Misanthrope, or Congreve's The Way of the World. In those profoundly dis-
quieting moments, the perimeters of dramatic genres were redefined. But however
disquieting a perception of man's nature is offered by these authors, it is counterbal-
anced by a more optimistic vision of the human condition in other characters or
other works. Moreover, goodness usually foils - in both senses of the word - the vil-
lainy of those who would persecute or victimize. In Alcestis, the ostensible self-sacri-
fice of the title character contrasts with her husband's willingness to let her die in his
place; in Measure for Measure, the healthy sexuality of Claudio and Julietta is sanc-
tioned while Angelo's hypocrisy is exposed; in Volpone, the predatory schemes of
Volpone and Mosca turn back upon their perpetrators while the virtue of Celia is
preserved. But in Orton's plays, virtue, if it can be found, is a sham.

Among aestheticians and philosophers who have discussed comedy, there is an

even greater emphasis on its dark and disquieting dimension. From the time of Aris-
totle, descriptions of comedy have stressed the superiority that the audience enjoys

6 Leonard C. Pronko, Georges Feydeau (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1975), p. 5.

7 Cedric Whitman, Aristophanes and the Comic Hero (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964), p.
23.

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484 / TZ, December 1982

over the play's characters. Hobbes's definition of laughter accentuates this aspect of
comedy:

The passion of laughter is nothing else but sudden glory arising from some sudden con-
ception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmity of others, or
with our own formerly.8

Baudelaire writes that "the comic is one of the clearest tokens of the satanic in man."9
For him, the laughter elicited by the violent and the grotesque, which he calls "the
absolute comic," is not only man's assertion of his own superiority but close to the
truth of human nature. For Nietzsche, laughter which could transcend morality was
the crowning glory offered by Zarathustra: "This laughter's crown, this rose-wreath
crown: to you, my brothers, do I throw this crown! I have canonized laughter; you
Higher Men, learn - to laugh!"1' While taste, decorum, and the desire for commer-
cial success may have restrained other playwrights, Orton seeks the laughter de-
scribed by Hobbes, Baudelaire, and Nietzsche - a laughter that redefines the bound-
aries of farce as other authors had redefined the nature of their genres.

As a British author of farce in the 1960s, Orton faced a tradition that was com-
mercially oriented and inhospitable to his limitless vision. Pronko argues that
French farce at the beginning of this century was more complex and disturbing than
its British counterpart: "The truth is that English farce blunted its edge with senti-
mentality and at least the suggestions of moralizing. Like melodrama and thesis
plays in both countries, English farce affirmed the status quo and entrenched the
public more securely in its comfortable beliefs."11

Updated by Rattigan, Coward, and Simpson, British farce had specific boundaries
dictated by popular mores, taste, and decorum that Orton's plays transgressed. In
the mid-sixties, farce flowered in London: Brian Rix's run of farces at Whitehall The-
atre continued to draw audiences throughout two decades; there were several revi-
vals of works by Feydeau, Sardou, and Ben Travers, as well as new farces by the
likes of Peter Shaffer and Orton.12 But for the preponderance of these dramatists,
the climate in which farce thrives - the reign of the Lord of Misrule, the Dionysian
revels of hedonism, the period of suspended morality - is ultimately an exception, at
best a temporary condition; eventually the return to the responsibilities and conven-
tions of society must be made. At this crucial point Joe Orton departs from his pre-
decessors and contemporaries by refusing to acknowledge a fundamental difference
between the bizarre circumstances of his plays and the course of mundane reality.

8 Thomas Hobbes, "Of Human Nature," The Complete Works of Thomas Hobbes, ed. William Moles-
worth (London: John Bohn, 1839), IV, 46.
9 Charles Baudelaire, "On the Essence of Laughter, and, in General, on the Comic in the Plastic Arts,"
trans. Jonathan Mayne, in Comedy: Meaning and Form, ed. Robert W. Corrigan (Scranton: Chandler,
1965), p. 458.
10 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (1961; rpt. Baltimore:
Penguin, 1969), p. 306.
11 Pronko, p. 185.
12 Simon Trussler, "Farce," Plays and Players, June 1966, pp. 56-58.

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485 / JOE ORTON AND FARCE

Orton's decision to write farce not only capitalized on the popularity it enjoyed in
the 1960s, but was also a reaction against the drama by and about the angry young
men of the 1950s. In 1964, with specific reference to The Ruffian on the Stair, he rec-
ognized the vast possibilities of farce as opposed to the limited opportunities of is-
sue-oriented drama:

Ten years ago this theme would have provided an addition to that moribund theatrical
genre, Strong Drama. Since the mid-fifties, playwrights have forsaken the inshore fisher-
ies for the ocean proper. Today it is farce.13

As Orton perceived farce in the mid-sixties, it was not only commercially but also
artistically viable as a vehicle to accommodate his perception of the boundless.
While other playwrights accepted the boundaries of farce, Orton evoked the spirit of
Euripides's The Bacchae by delving into the darkest recesses of the comic vision. His
brief career as a playwright, ended by his lurid murder, at the age of thirty-four, left
three full-length dramatic works (Entertaining Mr. Sloane, 1964; Loot, 1966, and
What the Butler Saw, 1969), two short plays (The Ruffian on the Stair, 1967 and the
The Erpingham Camp, 1967), two television dramas (The Good and Faithful Ser-
vant, 1967 and Funeral Games, 1968), a novel (Head to Toe, 1961), and an un-
produced screenplay (Up Against It, 1967).

With conventional farces, Orton's plays share themes that have remained remark-
ably consistent over the past four centuries: selfishness, lust, and greed. His plays
are also characterized by the frenetic physical activity that is regularly associated
with farce. Yet the term farce, even in its most sophisticated manifestations, still car-
ries the perjorative connotations of facile amusement and limited vision - connota-
tions distinctly unsuited to Orton's work. His farce neither provides nor suggests a
safe, orderly world to which his characters (or audience) can retreat.

Orton's deeply disturbing vision of man's animality implies that perhaps the best
thing we can do is to recognize the vacuity of categorical morality. Perverse and
healthy, right and wrong, rational and irrational are polarities which coalesce in his
plays. Hypocrisy seems to be the only or at least the cardinal sin in Orton's cos-
mos- and it manifests itself in myriad forms. Most obvious are the societal institu-
tions that ensnare his worst (i.e., most despicable) characters: the Catholic Church,
the police, the welfare state.

Orton is an anarchist who calls into question the most essential source of identity
- sexual identity. As John Lahr observes, "Orton had a clown's appetite for political
anarchy; but for him this was impossible without sexual anarchy."14 The anarchy
that he depicts draws its strength from the polymorphous perversity that is latent
and potential in every human subconscious. His landscapes are decidedly Hobbesian
in their bleakness and sterility where the best chance for an individual lies in his de-
votion to himself and his own pleasures. Orton's anarchy is more dangerous than

13 Quoted in John Lahr, Prick Up Your Ears (New York: Knopf, 1978), p. 133.
14 Lahr, p. 29.

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486 / TI, December 1982

the pity or fear (or whatever other tragic emotion) he might have generated, at least
partially because the comedy that it elicits is always grounded in laughter.

While Orton rarely uses the sophisticated drawing rooms or boudoirs of the upper
class that were so popular in nineteenth-century farce, in his earlier works he does
employ domestic settings that are at least superficially conventional. Typically, his
first works use a domestic situation with some jarring curiosity: an unstable com-
mon-law marriage (The Ruffian on the Stair); a family composed of an aged father,
an unmarried and nymphomaniacal daughter, and a homosexual son (Entertaining
Mr. Sloane); the belated marriage of a couple whose illegitimate children have al-
ready produced illegitimate grandchildren (The Good and Faithful Servant). What is
distinctly unconventional is not so much the setting of these plays, but the dearth of
institutional sanctions (especially concerning marriage) in his sitting rooms. In his
later works, Orton's settings are more hyperbolic but more complementary to his
thematic concerns: The Erpingham Camp, for instance, is a masochistic resort for
holiday makers. As Lahr notes: "Orton takes farce past Feydeau. He moves the
laughter out of the parlor and puts it in a mortuary (Loot) and a psychiatric clinic
(What the Butler Saw).""15

The settings of his works move from the lower-class environment of The Ruffian
on the Stair to the upper-class ambience of What the Butler Saw, but regardless of
the poverty or wealth of his characters, their motives and desires remain essentially
the same. By employing increasingly bourgeois and affluent settings, Orton did not
seek to deny his own lower-class background but rather to extend his perception of
man's animality by cutting across all class lines.

The atmosphere invariably generated by these settings is one of claustrophobia

and entrapment. Characters find themselves cornered in their own living rooms, im-
prisoned in Erpingham's vacation camp, or straight-jacketed in a mental institution.
These are, of course, Orton's microcosmic depictions of contemporary society; in
them, characters are driven by private fantasies and desires that are, at least in polite
society, neither acknowledged nor pursued. But for Orton, polite society is itself a
ruse.

The claustrophobia and entrapment evident at the end of Orton's

thetical to the freedom and power that one character usually enjoy
That freedom or power enables a character to pursue his fantasy and to
least one other character. Oblivious to the possibility that each can hois
his own petard, Kath seduces Sloane, Nurse McMahon orders Mr. M
pose to her, and Dr. Prentice orders Geraldine Barclay to undress f
examination. Yet in each instance as soon as someone of greater aut
(Kath's brother Ed, Inspector Truscott of the Yard, or Dr. Rance f
branch of Her Majesty's Government) the potential victimizer is at
vantage and in a position to become the victim of blackmail.

15 John Lahr, "Artist of the Outrageous," Evergreen Review, 14, No. 2 (Feb. 1970), 3

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487 / JOE ORTON AND FARCE

Blackmail, in fact, is the single vicious circumstance that appears most often in
Orton's work. In The Ruffian on the Stair, the intruder, Wilson, attempts to black-
mail both Joyce and Mike with the knowledge that she is or was a prostitute and
that Mike murdered Wilson's brother. By the play's end, the final blackmail might be
mistaken for love by the romantic as Joyce and Mike find themselves bound to each
other in their murder of Wilson. Their interdependence hinges upon mutually cor-
roborating alibis; so does whatever relationship they may have in the future.

Intruders like Wilson are a staple of Orton's plotlines. In Entertaining Mr. Sloane
the intruder, Sloane, begins in the familiar position of power since he manages to
control others because their lusts are at least momentarily stronger and more un-
manageable than his own. But, like Wilson in Ruffian on the Stair, by the end of the
play Sloane is the one controlled. If he was the victimizer early in the play, he has
become the victim in its final moments; the trickster has been tricked.

The difficulty in using terms such as victim or victimizer is that they imply moral
categories - categories beyond power relationships - which are not applicable to the
vast majority of Orton's characters. Certainly, for instance, none of the three char-
acters in The Ruffian on the Stair is "better" or more virtuous than the others. In En-
tertaining Mr. Sloane, this point is complicated by Kemp, the Dadda, who (might)
appear less (overtly) dangerous or (perhaps) only weaker than the other characters.
Orton himself risks no such moral judgments.16 His characters all have something to
hide, some complicity or secret that exposes them to the threat of blackmail.

Sloane appears a reasonably typical example. He seems to be little more than a

body with the fitness of youth, the strength to murder, and bleached-blonde hair:
unreflective, non-introspective, guiltless, and conscienceless. His past, which in-
cludes at least one murder, means nothing to him except as he might use it to ration-
alize his actions. Sloane is the product of a state and a society that has come to be-
lieve in behavioralism: Sloane is what he is because society has made him that way
and will, most likely, forgive or at least accommodate him for his deeds. And yet,
by the play's end, Sloane has lost his freedom; he will be shuffled between Kath and
Ed for as long as they want or can tolerate such an arrangement or until he kills one
or both of them. Power, in Orton's grotesquely yet comically Hobbesian vision, en-
riches any given character's freedom while simultaneously diminishing another's. Fi-
nally, everyone in Entertaining Mr. Sloane is compromised in an intricate web of
blackmailing. Sloane, Kath, and Ed are all interdependent: Kath is pregnant with
Sloane's child; Ed is infatuated with Sloane; Sloane, having murdered the Dadda, is
at the mercy of Kath and Ed.

The Good and Faithful Servant, a television play, is the last of Orton's works to
deal with the lower or lower-middle class. Like The Ruffian on the Stair and Enter-
taining Mr. Sloane, it lacks the verbal pyrotechnics, broad physical humor, and

16 Orton himself had little sympathy for the Dadda. In commenting on Alan Schneider's New York pro-
duction of Sloane, he wrote: "I don't like the old man. He's played as a spinsterish, malicious recluse. ...
But it achieves one thing . . . no one will mind him being murdered." Quoted in Lahr, Prick Up Your
Ears, pp. 178-79.

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488 / TI, December 1982

manic intensity that characterize Orton's later and more incisive farces. As his most
naturalistic work, The Good and Faithful Servant's potential for farce is diminished
by an overpowering system, a socialistic industrial complex, which dominates the
lives of its characters. But no matter how touched we may be by the thwarted ro-
mance between Buchanan and Edith, Buchanan is presented as a hypocrite who
would deny his doubly illegitimate grandson the carnal pleasures he himself en-
joyed. Whatever heartstrings are tugged in the opening scene of Buchanan's and
Edith's mutual rediscovery after fifty years of enervating employment, Buchanan
cannot see that he perpetuates the very system that he should despise. The claustro-
phobic and in this case asphyxiating atmosphere in the play is inextricably bound to
Orton's social commentary - the likes of Buchanan are trapped in drudgery because
they accept it as a given of modern life and thereby perpetuate it.

With Loot Orton moves beyond the comparatively naturalistic style of his earlier
plays and into the arena of Dionysiac farce. Indeed, the rebellion of Ray, Buchanan's
grandson in The Good and Faithful Servant, is entirely ineffectual when compared
with Hal's abandon in Loot. The sanctimoniousness of McLeavy, a prominent Cath-
olic layman, is less attractive than the perverse vigor of Fay, Hal, and Dennis. These
three characters display human desires unmitigated and unfettered by decorum,
mores, or even morality. Orton does nothing in Loot to vitiate the depravity of Fay,
Hal, and Dennis, and yet they vigorously hold the audience's affections. Fay has
murdered several previous husbands and patients; Hal, who passes the time by
"thieving from slot machines and deflowering the daughters of better men,"17 plans
to open an extravagently decadent brothel blasphemously called the Consummatum
Est; Dennis has spent considerable time in prison.

If Orton lapsed into any fatalistic vision of the human condition in The Good and
Faithful Servant, he makes light of such sentimentality and determinism in Loot.
Early in the play, Hal and Dennis are faced with the task of undressing Hal's mother
in order to hide the booty from a bank robbery. In light of what Hal himself per-
ceives to be "a Freudian nightmare," he tells his cohort:

HAL: Turning from the mirror. I am a Catholic. Putting his comb away. I can't un-
dress her. She's a relative. I can go to Hell for it.

DENNIS: I'll undress her then. I don't believe in Hell. He begins to screw down the coffin
lid.

HAL: That's typical of your upbringing, baby. Every luxury was lavished on you -
atheism, breast-feeding, circumcision. I had to make it my own way.
[p. 209]

In Orton's world, a sound, religious upbringing is hardly an advantage.

17 Joe Orton, Joe Orton: The Complete Plays (New York: Grove, 1977) p. 199. All further references to
Orton's plays appear in the text.

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489 / JOE ORTON AND FARCE

In The Erpingham Camp Orton's portrayal of the microcosm demonstrates not

only the fascistic and repressive nature of society but also the farcical willingness
with which its members accept and perpetuate that system. As in The Good and
Faithful Servant, Orton shows that such pyramidical structures, hierarchies in gen-
eral, draw strength from their members' acquiescence. The program of fun and
games for holiday makers at Erpingham's camp includes a regimen of humiliation -
a humiliation they accept and, in fact, seek out. When the Entertainments Organiser
drops dead and Riley receives his big opportunity to emcee the evening's festivities,
the campers do not hesitate to comply with his bizarre orders. Riley tells Ted to take
off his clothes and do the can-can, and Ted willingly consents. Riley tells Eileen,
who is pregnant, to enter in the loudest scream competition and when she does, he
slaps her face. Riley's ludicrous failure as Entertainments Organiser grows out of his
inability to distinguish lighthearted humiliation from blatant degradation. Once the
campers are driven to rebellion by Riley's lack of discernment, Erpingham disdains
Riley's plan for negotiations and lapses into political metaphors:

I won't have your rubbishy ideas brought into my camp. If it's your ambition to be Secre-
tary General of the United Nations, you're at liberty to apply for the post. Personally I
think you're better employed blowing up balloons for the underfives. (He draws himself
up with dignity.) This whole episode has been fermented by a handful of intellectuals. If
we stand firm by the principles on which the camp was founded the clouds will pass. To
give in now would be madness. (He takes a deep breath. He has recovered his compo-
sure.) Behave as though nothing had happened. It's my intention to defy the forces of
Anarchy with all that is best in twentieth-century civilisation. I shall put a record of Russ
Conway on and browse through a James Bond.
[p. 3081

Erpingham is finally lynched by the outraged campers, and order is restored as Riley
takes over the camp with full intentions of emulating Erpingham's administration. In
The Erpingham Camp, which Lahr identifies as Orton's "version of The Bacchae,"18
there is no order of promise to supersede the failures of the old.

Funeral Games continues Orton's preoccupation with reversible hierarchies as he

returns again to religion in this television play. Pringle, having gained notoriety as
well as propriety by supposedly murdering his adulterous wife, preaches a brand of
Christianity dependent upon the lack of forgiveness. As he puts it, "I won't tolerate
forgiveness. It's a thing of the past" (p. 340). But Pringle's acclaim as a popular if not
populist preacher is threatened because he has not actually murdered his wife; she,
in fact, is living with McCorquodale, who did murder his wife when he discovered
her adultery with, of all people, Pringle. Once again, the blackmail situation domi-
nates the plot, for if the public learns that Pringle has not exacted the bloody retribu-
tion from his wife and that he was guilty of the very crime for which he allegedly
murdered her, his newly found wealth will perish along with his prestige.

18 Lahr, Prick Up Your Ears, p. 209.

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490 / TJ, December 1982

What the Butler Saw, Orton's final and best play, is confirmation of Bentley's
statement that "outrage to family piety, and propriety is certainly at the heart of
farce."19 Set in a psychiatric clinic whose purpose "isn't to cure, but to liberate and
exploit madness" (p. 387), the play deals with the most serious themes of litera-
ture - incest, madness, birth and death - with astonishing irreverence. At the play's
core is a quartet of characters, Geraldine Barclay, Nicholas Beckett, and Dr. and
Mrs. Prentice, who, under other circumstances, might have comprised the quintes-
sential nuclear family. But the fact that Geraldine and Nicholas are the twin off-
spring of the Prentices is not revealed until the libidinal depths of each character
have been plumbed.

The play begins as Dr. Prentice's attempt to seduce Geraldine is interrupted by his
wife's unexpected return from the Station Hotel, where Nicholas Beckett attempted
to blackmail and rape her. Into this tidy psychological nightmare walks Dr. Rance,
representative of Her Majesty's Government and, as he says, "of order" (p. 417), "ob-
viously a force to be reckoned with" (p. 376). Rance's presence confuses the power
structure because Prentice is now in danger of being accused of professional miscon-
duct.

Within moments of his entrance Rance commits Geraldine on the strength of

Prentice's statement that she sexually provoked him. Unwittingly, Rance seizes upon
the notion that "this child was unnaturally assaulted by her own father. I shall," he
says, "base my future actions upon that assumption. .... It's obvious to the meanest
amateur, Prentice, that you resemble the patient's father. That is why she undressed
herself. When I arrived on the scene she was about to re-enact that initial experience
with her parent" (p. 383). Blundering upon what is not revealed as the truth until the
play's final moments, Rance plans to make a fortune with a lurid sensationalistic
" 'documentary-type' novelette [that] will go into twelve record-breaking reprints"
(pp. 424-25).
Rance's voyeuristic delight in applying his psycho-sexual theories to this situation
underscores Orton's faith in man's rampant and polymorphous sexual appetites.
Rance can be seen as the ultimate extension of the Vice character in that he has been
sanctioned and even empowered by society itself. He is directly responsible for sev-
eral of the most grotesquely funny incidents (e.g., the shaving of Geraldine's head)
and indirectly responsible for most of the others (e.g., the attempt of Geraldine to
disguise herself as a page from the Station Hotel).

What the Butler Saw moves beyond the previously defined boundaries of farce in
that it shows us that the bizarre goings-on at Prentice's clinic are not a temporary
aberration from the orderly course of events, but that disorder and confusion grow
immediately out of normal conditions. The sole unusual circumstance is the arrival
of Rance. Otherwise, Orton is careful to suggest, everything is as perverse as it nor-
mally is. Perversion, in this instance, is not something out of the ordinary, but a

19 Bentley, p. 227.

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491 / JOE ORTON AND FARCE

daily reality: Mrs. Prentice has cavorted with what her husband describes as a coven
of witches for some time; Prentice himself has regularly misbehaved with job appli-
cants; Nicholas Beckett has often molested guests at the Station Hotel.

At the end of his plays, Orton presents society as a threat that will uncover and
consequently compromise his characters. The police are called in at the end of Ruf-
fian and Sloane only after the proper alibis have been concocted. At the end of Loot,
Fay tells Hal that he will have to give up Dennis because "people would talk" (p.
275); Funeral Games brings on the police with the threat of prison for Pringle, but
his acclaim as a righteously indignant husband and minister will most likely sustain
him through whatever charges are brought against him. Butler probably has the
most striking of Orton's endings as the "larger than life-sized" bronze phallic frag-
ment of Churchill's statue is brandished and the characters reluctantly accept their
need to return to a society of duplicity.

The endings link the characters as participants as well as accomplices in some deed
that society finds improper. As their deeds remain their own and the audience's se-
cret, Orton's characters are together in having seen and shown the animalistic, and
often unsavory side of human selfishness, desires, and out-and-out lust. Orton's
endings, like Shakespeare's or Jonson's, do not invariably see justice done, good re-
warded, and evil punished. That Mr. McLeavy is hauled off to the police station
and, we assume, to prison, is fundamentally no different.

Orton's farces have appeared so appalling because they refuse to return the audi-
ence to the safety and stability of the status quo. By taking the standard characteris-
tics of farce - man's unregenerate and unbounded lusts, his animality, his avarice,
his willingness to indulge in patently ridiculous action, and the reign of Misrule -
and taking them seriously, in fact giving them to us as the human condition, Orton
has outraged nearly everyone and stood true to his claim that his are moral plays.20
By not compromising, not showing that the action of the play is a "temporary tru-
ancy from the family pieties,"21 but rather a relatively typical episode, Orton ap-
proximates the Nietzschean "all-too-human" vision of man.

Orton's claim that he is a moralist is predicated upon his refusal to undercut the
picture of man's insatiably aggressive nature by sleight-of-hand at the end of the
plays. At the end of What the Butler Saw, the double incest between mother and
son, father and daughter is greeted not with the horror that moved Oedipus to blind
himself but with the serene recognition that even one's own son may be good in bed
(specifically, in this instance, in a linen closet). None of the characters feel the need
for any atonement, principally because they feel no sense of sin, guilt, or immorality.

20 In both the program for Loot and a subsequent interview with Giles Gordon, Orton professed to be a
puritan. In the interview Orton agreed that Loot was "a highly moral play." See "Joe Orton Interviewed
by Giles Gordon," Transatlantic Review, 24 (1967), 97.
21 Bentley, "The Psychology of Farce," The New Republic, 13 January 1958, p. 17.

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492 / TI, December 1982

In writing about farce Eric Bentley mused that "It is hard to imagine what true in-
difference to morals could produce, if anything at all."22 Orton's indifference to mo-
rals, at least as the term morals is conventionally used, produced a decidedly bleak
and deeply disquieting yet vigorous insight into humanity's truest wishes and most
closely guarded desires. His perception of human nature is neither attractive nor op-
timistic, but by embodying it in farce, Orton realized the possibility for farce to con-
vey a sense of the boundless, the unlimited, the Dionysiac. Like the works of some
earlier dramatists who considered man's unbridled desires, Orton's plays redefine his
genre to accommodate his insight into the unbounded desires and energies in man.
Orton moves farce beyond banality and toward a vision of the infinite.

22 Bentley, The Psychology of Farce," The New Republic, 6 January 1958, p. 19.

COEDITOR

UCTA invites applications from those interested in serving as coeditor and then ed
tor of TI from January 1984 through December 1987. Coeditor and editor alternate
preparation of issues for the press and bear joint responsibility for the acceptanc
manuscripts. After two years the coeditor becomes editor and has ultimate responsib
ity for the journal.
If you are interested, please send a letter setting forth your qualifications, a curriculu
vitae, and the names of three people who are sending letters of reference to: Don
Loeffler, Executive Vice-President UCTA, Department of Speech and Theatre Art
Western Carolina University, Cullowhee, NC 28723. If you have questions about t
nature of the work, the present editors will be happy to answer them.
Applications are assessed by a committee composed of the President and Executi
Vice-President of UCTA, and the Editor and Coeditor of TI. The committee makes
recommendation to the Governing Board of UCTA, which makes the appointment

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