In this review of a 1994 revival of What the Butler Saw, noted Orton biographer Lahr offers a laudatory appraisal of both Orton's skill as a farceur and the merits of this new production. Lahr calls What the Butler Saw Orton's ' farce masterpiece."

In May, 1967, Joe Orton sat with friends at a café in Tangier. He had every reason to feel free and full of fun. He was thirty-four, rich, newly famous after the award-winning success of' 'Loot" (1966), which he had turned, by his account, from "a failed farce into a successful farce," and with his new farce masterpiece, ' 'What the Butler Saw"—now at the American Repertory Theatre, in Cambridge—completed and in the manuscript drawer under his bed in the tiny North London flat he shared with his mentor and eventual murderer, Kenneth Halliwell. Orton had already made a mental note to hot...