Tonight my sister and I caught a preview of the play, ‘What the Butler Saw’ held at the Criterion Theatre. Our £10 tickets got us fairly close to the front and proved to be a rather entertaining night. I had no preconceptions of the play, and it was only until recently that I found out that the English colloquialism ‘What the Butler Saw’ refers to seeing something with voyeuristic connotations.

The play follows the script written well over thirty years ago by Joe Orton starting off with a psychiatrist’s misguided attempt to seduce his secretary. Thrown in his drunk and floozy wife, a young and ambitious Bell boy, the doctor’s overzealous reviewer from the city department, a dim-witted policeman, a handful of lies begetting lies, plenty of slamming doors and quick wit and you get an idea of what this classic English farce offers to its audience.

The script is extremely quick with rarely a moment for neither the audience, nor the cast members to actually breathe. The plot builds up momentum quickly and will have the audience laughing at the awkward situations in which the doctor tries to untangle himself with but finds him even more involved with lie after lie. The ending comes rather suddenly and slightly unbelievably but is still a good show to go and watch for those that appreciate British humour.