What The Butler Saw

Reviewed by Holly Bartges

Whatever it is the Butler saw demonstrates he had to have sharp eagle 360-degree eyesight to process exactly what it was he did see with Germinal Stage Denver’s brilliant, hilarious knockout production of Joe Orton’s stunning farce What The Butler Saw.

Elizabeth Parks as Geraldine, Mark Shonsey as Nicholas Beckett and Erica Sarzin-Borrillo as Mrs. Prentice in Germinal Stage Denver’s production of What The Butler Saw.

Nothing less than professional artistic actors could possibly climb into these zany off the wall characters who speak but rarely listen, foster opinions with quick judgments, keep the pace rocking, and speak these lines with a straight face. Anything less and this excruciatingly hysterical tongue-in-cheek social commentary would fly out one of the revolving doors and fall on its face.

Not to worry. GSD with its best foot-forward provides an incredible cast including: Tupper Cullum, Erica Sarzin-Borrillo, Ed Baierlein, Elizabeth Parks, Mark Shonsey, and Tom Borrillo.

Directed and designed by Baierlein, What The Butler Saw was first produced in London in 1969, two years after Orton’s brutal murder by his crazed lover. Today’s critical theatrical world considers this play to be Orton’s masterpiece and one of the most brilliant farces ever written. 1969 London didn’t think so. The audience became so verbally incensed critics struggled to review the play. They couldn’t hear the lines because of the audience’s horrific response.

Today, and particularly at GSD, if critics can’t hear the lines, it is because laughter remains constant.

Using comedy as a tool, hitched to a slapstick frame Orton takes deliberate aim at the mental health profession, psychiatrists in particular, governmental incompetence, religion, literature, writers, sexual identities and mis-identities, nudity, cross-dressing, power, authority, marriage, and infidelity. There is very little he doesn’t take a pot shot at with his sharpened wit.

Orton spent two years in prison for a developed taste in practical jokes defacing library books.

It all starts simple enough. Dr. Prentice interviews Geraldine Barclay for a secretarial position. Tupper Cullum wonderfully cloaks himself in a holier-than-thou superior psychiatrist who turns words and phrases upside down. If Geraldine becomes confused it certainly isn’t his fault. With wide innocent eyes looking out from a sheltered demeanor, Elizabeth Parks brings Geraldine wondrously alive whether she is defending her secretarial skills, undressing for the lecherous Prentice, running from someone, hiding from someone, or assuming Nicholas Beckett’s (Shonsey) page boy personality because his clothes are the only clothes she can find to wear.

While Prentice smirks over convincing Geraldine her undressing is a normal interview tactic, his wife returns unexpectedly. Sarzin-Borrillo takes Mrs. Prentice for a highfalutin cold-as-ice-nose-in-the-air-hungry-for-love-intellectual snob. Sharp-filed words fly between the two both vying for the upper hand, both always thinking they have it. Nicholas has snatched her purse after a rambunctious tussle between the two of them. To get her purse back, to appease Nicholas she promised him the secretarial position.

Barbs spared between Prentice and his wife reveal a high stakes game played of devastating honesty, superiority threatened by superiority, a hilarious undertone, and a trust between the two of them strong enough to withstand the laughing venomous comments. At one point Mrs. Prentice admits, “I hardly ever have sexual intercourse,” to which Prentice responds “You were born with your legs apart. They’ll send you to the grave in a Y-shaped coffin.” Chemistry between Cullum and Sarzin-Borrillo crackles. The relationship between Prentice and his wife survive. They need each other. No one else could fill the other’s shoes. Cullum and Sarzin-Borrillo own the process to exploit the bigger than life, cartooned characters.

Adding to the complication, Dr. Rance (Baierlein) arrives for a government inspection of Prentice’s clinic under contrived suspicion indiscretions hide in the corners. Baierlein sees to it Rance strides the governmental authority train dishing out his opinions, jumping to quick conclusions, making his case knowing he doesn’t have to listen to any explanation from anyone. He even has a brilliant knack for taking someone’s straightforward answers turning the evidence to support his pre-conceived theories. Prentice meets his nemesis and his match with Rance.

The lines come as fast and furious as the characters racing through one door and out another. A brilliant line will race by and two lines later the mind says “wow that was really funny.”

Rance can’t accept Geraldine as a secretarial applicant, convinced she is a patient. At the same time he insists upon meeting the secretarial applicant Miss Barclay. Someone has to satisfy him. Nicholas gets roped into wearing a dress and a wig. Some of the most amusing moments come with Shonsey’s woe-be-gone expressions in the middle of the catapultic three-ring circus of word dodging in the attempt to keep ahead of the game.

Borrillo takes on the psyche of Sargent Mitch who is convinced someone has parts of Winston Churchill lying around somewhere, and he wants them returned. In the fourth ring of circus chaos, the Sargent becomes sedated ending up wearing a woman’s dress appearing and disappearing at the most inopportune time. Seeing this staunch authoritarian figure stripped of his outward dignity revealing human vulnerabilities pinpointed by Borrillo is an exhaustive sight for sore eyes worth continued chuckles throughout the performance.

Bierlein’s Rance piles the evidence against the clinic in the middle of the stage floor while everyone dances around each other and around themselves.

With serious comments being made in unserious tones of voice, confusion, chaos, mis identification, superior attitudes, mockery, deception racing through the swinging doors, What The Butler Saw has to be classified as a masterful piece of writing. While the body laughs, the mind thinks. The execution by this cast is magnificent playing into and onto each other digging deeper and deeper holes.

It’s racy with a laugh, and the laughter keeps it from being raunchy as 1969 London saw it. Perhaps if they had seen it with this cast, they’d be laughing still. 1969 was before the days of Jerry Springer, the escapades of rich young people doing anything for publicity, the Dr. Phil House where families confess, accuse and tear each other apart hanging indiscretions on the national TV laundry line for millions to witness instead of just the neighbors.

Because of the absurd, well-constructed, off-the-wall characters, and their poignant lines pin-pricked with arrogant absurdity What the Butler Saw flies with brilliant hysterical undertones. Most of what bombards us in the news media isn’t funny. Indiscretions appear from the most unlikely places. Orton’s comical characters give reason to laugh. Some see Orton as a madman. His character development, his ingenious sentence construction, his ability to wed a variety of different comedic forces, and his clever insight perhaps mark him as a playwright before his time. The more the butler sees, the longer he sees it, the more vitally significant stands this work, allowing us to laugh at the unlaughable with juicy absurd characters so magnificently brought to life in this production.

What the Butler Saw is a definite must see because of what it says in the midst of revolving doors, what it doesn’t say in between the lines, and the brilliant intelligent absurd characterizations bought to light by highly polished actors. What The Butler Saw combines hilarious scenarios with mind tingling prods to keep everything in perspective, something these characters are not programmed to decipher.