What the Butler Saw is Joe Orton's madcap farce set within the walls of a private psychiatric clinic, where a philandering doctor's attempt to seduce a young secretary during a fake job interview spirals rapidly out of control with the arrival of his domineering wife, a lecherous government inspector, and a series of increasingly implausible disguises, cross-dressing, and mistaken identities. As characters are shuffled in and out of closets, medicated against their will, and repeatedly misidentified as patients, doctors, or something else entirely, the clinic itself becomes a metaphor for a society Orton depicts as fundamentally, comically insane beneath its veneer of respectable order. Orton's rapid-fire, epigrammatic dialogue delivers biting social and sexual satire beneath the frenetic physical comedy, skewering psychiatry, authority, and bourgeois propriety alike. The play was left unfinished at the time of Orton's death and premiered posthumously to controversy for its outrageous content. Its anarchic energy and quotable wit have since made it one of the defining works of British farce.

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