Opened 16 Apr 1870. Front re-constructed in 1890. 694 seats. Member of the Society of London Theatre. Each year there will be, from 1997, an Autumn to Spring Variety Season. The theatre is run by Max Weitzenhoffer.
Welcome to the madhouse, as Joe Orton's legendary 1967 comedy opens at the Vaudeville Theatre this spring. Starring Omid Djalili, Tim McInnerny, Samantha Bond and Georgia Moffett, What the Butler Saw is an insanely funny, full-throttle tour de farce. Hysterical one liners and outrageous twists collide, as the characters lose the plot, their wits, and their clothes.
When psychoanalyst Dr Prentice instructs his new secretary to undress, little does he expect to be interrupted by his wife, her blackmailing lover, a meddling government inspector and an inquisitive policeman. But hiding a naked woman is the least of his worries, as libidos run riot, identities are swapped and social decorum is buried. Madness and mayhem mock morality, and laughter reigns supreme. What the Butler Saw is the last and arguably the finest work of one of this nation's most celebrated playwrights. A gloriously witty and shockingly hilarious comedy, you'd be mad to miss it!
Omid Djalili is an award-winning British-Iranian actor/comedian. Not only acclaimed as one of Britain's funniest stand-up comedians, he has also featured in films including The Mummy, Gladiator, Spy Game, Mean Machine, Modigliani, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, Casanova, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End,The Love Guru, The Infidel and Sex and the City 2. On television, his credits include Small Potatoes, Dinutopia, Whoopi and The Omid Djalili Show.
Tim McInnerny is best known for playing Lord Percy and Captain Darling in four series of Blackadder. His stage roles include Hamlet at the National Theatre, Iago and Judge Brack at Shakespeare's Globe. His many film roles include Notting Hill, 101 Dalmatians and 102 Dalmatians, Casanova, Severance and Johnny English Reborn.
Samantha Bond returns to the West End where she was most recently seen in An Ideal Husband. Her other recent credits include Arcadia and Donkeys’ Years at the Comedy and King James readings at the National.On film, she is best known for portraying Miss Moneypenny in several of the James Bond films and has been seen on television playing Lady Rosamund Painswick in Downton Abbey and Angela in Outnumbered.
Georgia Moffett’s television roles include Doctor Who, White Van Man and Merlin. On stage, she has appeared in Total Eclipse at the Menier Chocolate Factory and Getting Through at the Royal Court.
Joe Orton’s final play What the Butler Saw has been revived at the West End’s Vaudeville Theatre, where it opened to press last night (16 May 2012, previews from 4 May).
What the Butler Saw was first produced in 1969, two years after the author's untimely death. In it, sex-obsessed psychiatrist Dr Prentice (McInnerny) is frustrated in his attempts to seduce a secretary by the arrival of his nymphomaniac wife (Bond), over-enthusiastic inspector Dr Rance (Djalili) and a dim-witted policeman.
"…as Sean Foley’s energetic production, very well designed by Alice Power, is at many pains to point out, the real joy of this 1969 classic resides in its jewelled dialogue, which is as witty and aphoristic as Oscar Wilde’s, and pushed to the limits of indecency. As in Wilde, the humour lies in the rhythm of extreme antithesis, surprise vocabulary and an air of drastic finality … This makes the experience of sitting through the play slightly exhausting, but the ship stays afloat thanks to the brilliant comic contortions of Tim McInnerny as Dr Prentice and Samantha Bond as his braying, dipsomaniac, dissatisfied wife … Director of the madhouse operations is the visiting inspector, Dr Rance, whom the comedian Omid Djalili plays with a ferocious, but very limited, barking bullishness. Djalili’s technique of biting off phrases and spitting them out undermines the fluent brilliance of his diagnostic speeches and ludicrous conclusions. But there is so much to enjoy in every line of this play that the mechanics of the farce - which are perfectly aligned - can sometimes be taken for granted."
“Joe Orton's final play, unrevised at the time of his death in 1967, is a hard one to get right, since it combines manic farce with non-stop social commentary. That doesn't excuse Sean Foley's production. Everyone bellows, barks, screeches and shouts so much that Orton's subversive wit gets buried under an avalanche of coarse acting ... from his first entry, Omid Djalili, playing a corrupt Whitehall official, delivers every line as if it were the climax of the play. All this is in the first 10 minutes. Any possibility of escalating mayhem goes out of the window ... Foley also paints the lily by having two of the main characters getting smashed on limitless supplies of whiskey: a joke-killer if ever there was one, since the nightmare of farce depends on people being painfully alert to their predicament ... even the magnificent Samantha Bond, as the shrink's sexually inordinate wife, is forced into overplaying her hand. The end result is a grotesque cartoon in which Orton is deprived of any real sense of danger.”
"Sean Foley has form with this kind of material, not least as director of The Ladykillers, but his production is strident ... Although there are passages where the timing is undeniably good, as farce requires, a lot of Orton’s jokes are delivered in a laboriously playful style, and the weaker ones (notably an extended gag about rape) feel regrettable ... Djalili is an affable comedian with a quick wit, yet his performance here is loud and pedestrian. Dr Rance is a man never lost for words, the embodiment of officialdom at its most absurd ... Tim McInnerny is impressively animated as Dr Prentice, the randy specialist who runs the clinic Rance is examining. He’s particularly adept at the physical comedy, much of which revolves around his entanglement with a job applicant who ends up being mistaken for a patient and later a bell boy. In this role Georgia Moffett has a winsome charm; she’s energetic too, and makes an especially whole-hearted commitment to the chaos."
"Something has gone terribly wrong here. Joe Orton’s What the Butler Saw ... has long struck me as a comic masterpiece. Yet watching Sean Foley’s over-frenetic, emphatically zany new production there were long stretches that seemed almost sadistically unfunny, as the actors shouted, mugged desperately and avoided no cheap trick in their desperate pursuit of laughs ... There are moments that suggest what might have been. At his best Tim McInnerny captures the desperate panic of the true farceur as the philandering Dr Prentice, but the show would be hugely improved if he began with more of a slow burn ... And Georgia Moffett discovers moments of real pathos as the poor abused secretary. Omid Djalili is numbingly unfunny, however, as the mad shrink who wants to certify everyone he encounters, and I staggered out of the theatre feeling more exhausted than entertained.”
[W@S_IMG]#http://whatsonstage.com/images/WhattheButler_360_2012.jpg#360#240#Tim McInnerny & Samantha Bond in What the Butler Saw. Photo: Simon Annand[/W@S_IMG]Quentin Letts Daily Mail ★★
"Mr McInnerny is perfect for Orton. He has that trembling fervour, that crazed glint of eye, part David Haig, part John Cleese. Fifteen minutes in, I was in a state of merriment, not least because Samantha Bond had joined proceedings as Prentice’s wife. Miss Bond has the voice of Judi Dench, the physique of a netball player, the twinkle of a great comedienne. Then Mr Djalili’s government inspector Dr Rance appears: full-on from the start, a grating voice, a less-than-elastic face, wooden strides across the stage, blast, blast, blast of the lines. Perhaps this is how director Sean Foley wants him to play it. Whatever the origins of this performance, it is a mistake ... You have to admire the force and energy of the thing but I am afraid I zoned out well before the end."
Libby Purves The Times ★★★
"Goodness, what an angry play. Joe Orton’s last work, posthumously staged in 1969, is the farce of fury ... The Lord Chamberlain’s censorship ended a mere year earlier, permitting Orton’s exhilarating cascade of references to nymphomania, pederasty, insanity, rape, schoolgirls being assaulted, rent boys and necrophilia. Yet it is the neo-Freudian fascination with sex, even stronger today, that is his target ... The director Sean Foley runs it full-tilt, loud and staccato, until there is nowhere left to go. Tim McInnerny disintegrates nicely as the psychiatrist whose attempt at seduction leads to chaos, and Samantha Bond, displaying ‘comedy legs’ as potent as the great Lipman’s, gives full nympho-comic value and subtle pathos ... it’s an angry play, and anger is best not shouted. I suspect the cast (especially Djalili) will gradually find more subtleties. But it’s good to see it back."
Forget good clean fun: Joe Orton’s What the Butler Saw is a hilarious, down and dirty farce of cross people and cross dressing in a lunatic asylum masquerading as a private clinic, where a job interview leads to a thwarted seduction and a knock-on series of catastrophes.
But as Sean Foley’s energetic production, very well designed by Alice Power, is at many pains to point out, the real joy of this 1969 classic resides in its jewelled dialogue, which is as witty and aphoristic as Oscar Wilde’s, and pushed to the limits of indecency.
[WOS_QU@TE]#As in Wilde, the humour lies in the rhythm of extreme antithesis, surprise vocabulary and an air of drastic finality#[/WOS_QU@TE]As in Wilde, the humour lies in the rhythm of extreme antithesis, surprise vocabulary and an air of drastic finality. The temptation, to which the cast mostly succumb, is to confuse thumping authority with a sly and undercutting wit, so that the hectic physical action - the slamming of doors and thrusting of underwear into flower vases - is matched with a similar stress and vocal emphasis.
This makes the experience of sitting through the play slightly exhausting, but the ship stays afloat thanks to the brilliant comic contortions of Tim McInnerny as Dr Prentice and Samantha Bond as his braying, dipsomaniac, dissatisfied wife, a sort of ruined Coral Browne (who played the role in the first production); she exchanges her fur coat (covering a black negligee) for the floral dress of Georgia Moffett’s cute but sexually innocent interviewee, Geraldine Barclay, without even noticing.
Barclay in turn finds herself kitted out in the costume of the bell boy from the Station Hotel where most of the play’s marital and sexual confusions can be traced to a Boris Becker-style encounter in a linen cupboard. Director of the madhouse operations is the visiting inspector, Dr Rance, whom the comedian Omid Djalili plays with a ferocious, but very limited, barking bullishness.
Djalili’s technique of biting off phrases and spitting them out undermines the fluent brilliance of his diagnostic speeches and ludicrous conclusions. But there is so much to enjoy in every line of this play that the mechanics of the farce - which are perfectly aligned - can sometimes be taken for granted.
Nick Hendrix is too drag-queeny as the bell boy in a dress, but he and Jason Thorpe as the dull policeman sucked into a vortex of orgiastic mayhem play funny and straight where it matters most. And all evidence of moral turpitude is trumped by McInnerny’s delicious delivery, hair flopping manically, of the suddenly topical line, "There is nothing furtive in my relationship with the editor of the Guardian".
It was fun--slightly dated but farce is farce and supposed to be silly. I also prefer the other Orton comedies like Mr Sloane and Loot. Good cast but felt Omid spent too much time shouting and maybe over acting so sometimes you could not actually hear what he was saying. - Joe Spiteri
17 May 12
Strangely surprised at how good it was.
Great piece of writing done quite well! - Cassox
17 May 12
Too too mad right from the off, let it build.. there is still a good play here and some lines that have lost none of their bite.
It can still be very funny.
Good work from other cast members but Tim McInnerny was directed all wrong. - westendfirstnighter
17 May 12
i saw this during previews and mostly agree with the WOS review Tim& samantha are both great Tims subtle & not so subtle comic contortions are hilarious but also agree Omid plays the part very different to others in the part and wedo miss some of the lines in the barking delivery although still very funny - robg
17 May 12
Omid Djalili was all at sea and the play itself has not worn well, unlike Loot & Entertaining Mr Sloane. More ramblings about it on my blog http://frontrowdress.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/what-butler-saw-vaudeville-theatre.html - Front Row Dress
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