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Theater: Shockless therapy
Aging Orton satire unjacketed by talented MTC cast...

by Lee Brady

Farce is the trickiest kind of comedy to pull off since it is usually a send-up of its time and society. It can seem irrelevant to ours because it depends on topical satire and characters that come off as comic stereotypes.

Keep that in mind when you see What the Butler Saw, playwright Joe Orton's savage satire of life in 1950s England.

Smartly directed by Amy Glazer, this sex farce comes off like gangbusters (as do secretary Geraldine Barley's—played by Cat Walleck—bra and panties). Nicholas Beckett (Rowan Brooks) also loses his bellboy uniform, while even the upstanding pillar of the law (Kevin Rolston) drops his authority along with his uniform.

These strippings are all in service to a plot that has Dr. Rance (Andy Murray) coming to check out just how efficiently Dr. Prentice (Charles Shaw Robinson) is running Her Majesty's mental hospital. Unlike Cuckoo's Nest, in this one we don't meet the patients, but the staff is crazy enough to keep the audience laughing.

Murray is pure officiousness, with all the stupidity we associate with a public servant. Robinson's Dr. Prentice just wants to get it on with Walleck's Geraldine, but is frustrated by his nymphomaniac of a wife. Stacy Ross as Mrs. Prentice makes a habit of unexpectedly entering one of the three swinging doors on Erik Flatmo's slightly odd hospital set.

She is trying to avoid Rolston's blackmailing bellboy who is using provocative photos of her to get a job in the hospital. The policeman is on a mission to collect a missing body part that he has reason to believe is in the secretary's hands, and he will go to any lengths to get it back onto the statue of Winston Churchill, where it belongs.

Glazer and her actors keep this ridiculous roundelay in the air as they prove to us that those we should trust most, we shouldn't. They show us how sex rules even in the asylum, and there is lots of buggery in both high and low places.

But in our 21st century we've seen it all, and even this excellent ensemble can't create the shock that rocked the house when the show was first performed. We have all become blasé about sex and the medical profession and no matter how brilliantly Orton played with words, and how fast and loose the actors interpret them, there is little to gasp about in Marin Theatre's production. Go to watch the actors work for the well-timed laughs.

NOW PLAYING

What the Butler Saw runs through July 5 at Marin Theatre Company, 397 Miller Ave., Mill Valley; 415/388-5208, www.marintheatre.org .

Tell Lee to break a leg at freshleebrady@gmail.com