Butler sees West End revival in May with Djalili?

Omid Djalili will play Dr Rance in a major new production of Joe Orton’s farce What The Butler Saw, according to the Daily Mail.

Directed by Sean Foley, who was behind the recently acclaimed stage adaptation of The Ladykillers, the production is apparently scheduled for the Vaudeville Theatre in May.

Djalili was last in the West End in 2009 when he took over from fellow actor-comedian Rowan Atkinson as Fagin in Oliver! at the Theatre Royal Drury. His many screen credits include BBC’s The Omid Djalili Show, the US sitcom Whoopi with Whoopi Goldberg and the films The Mummy, Gladiator and Pirates of the Caribbean III.

Orton’s last play, What the Butler Saw was
first produced in 1969, two years after the author’s untimely death. In
it, sex-obsessed psychiatrist Dr Prentice is frustrated in his attempts
to seduce a secretary by the arrival of his nymphomaniac wife, over-enthusiastic inspector Dr Rance and a dim-witted policeman.