Butley

Synopsis

Rapier-tongued lecturer Ben Butley (Dominic West) is having a monumentally bad day. So bad, he’s making sure everyone else has a worse one. His estranged wife has taken up with the most boring man in London. His beloved protégé has found a new benefactor (one he is actually sleeping with, to boot). In an unprecedented act of betrayal even the English department’s resident failure has a book deal.

Once a charismatic tutor and an authority on T. S. Eliot, Butley now sharpens his mind on his unfortunate colleagues while trying to evade his more persistent students. Mischievous irony and gleeful trouble-making all feature in his arsenal; inevitably they prove to be the weapons of his own tragic self-destruction.

Simon Gray's Butley first premiered in the West End in 1970, directed by Harold Pinter and with Alan Bates in the title role.

Best known for his role in the HBO series The Wire, Dominic West makes his first return to the West End since his acclaimed performance in Life is a Dream at the Donmar in 2009. Other West End appearances include As You Like It, The Voysey Inheritance and Rock 'n' Roll.

Penny Downie and Paul McGann also star in Olivier award winning director Lindsay Posner's new production.

We have some great deals on Butley tickets so follow the buy tickets links ro see Dominic West in this classic play.

Our Review:

Michael Coveney - 7 June 2011

You have to give it up for Dominic West. Since finding fame and fortune as flawed cop Jimmy McNulty in The Wire, he has set himself huge targets on stage; breathing fiery life into the impossible Segismundo in Life is a Dream at the Donmar, and taking on Iago later this year in his home town of Sheffield.

The middle portrait in this triptych of gabbing, self-obsessed lunatic misanthropes is Ben Butley, Simon Gray’s intensely dislikeable English tutor in a London University college who, in the course of a decidedly downbeat day, gloats over his own dismissal by (he thinks, withdrawal from) the rest of the world.

In West End folklore, the role was defined by Alan Bates in 1971, whose accommodating charms made the desiccated bore irresistible. Since then, I’ve only seen John Nettles have a go (in 1984). West bravely and uncompromisingly exposes Butley for the bastard he undoubtedly is, and the play for its shocking rawness.

Gra...

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Latest User Review

Steve - 25 August 2011:

Dominic West does a terrific job as Butley, a man who's cruel joking masks utter despair, who tortures all those around him with his bitterness. West imbues Butley with the requisite causticness and quick wit (prompting laughter in the audience) of a man with a brilliant mind, but no sense of purpose, and he withdraws into a tender resignation and a softer voice pattern just enough for us to glimpse immense loneliness and yearning beneath the surface. Martin Hutson is equally memorable as the one last friend that Butley has, quietly slipping away from Butley's poisonous influence. At first, the constrained set (Butley never leaves his office) felt unpleasantly claustrophobic, but as the piece progressed, the claustrophia induced becomes a suitable metaphor for a brilliant mind imprisoned by surrender to futility. The play is a warning to all of us to actively engage with life or risk falling into depression....

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