Butley
As to why we went to see Butley, refresh your memory.
Simon Gray's Butley is a Greek tragedy in every way but the most important one: there is no catharsis. The hero comes to no blinding insight. He does not reach the sudden understanding that he himself is the cause of everything that has gone wrong. And, given Ben Butley's situation, it would wholly bogus if he did.
Butley is no longer a contemporary play. The world has slipped since the early Seventies (the show opened on Broadway for the first time in 1972). It no longer accommodates people like Butley; it institutionalizes them. Today, Butley would be shuffled off to rehab, which, from what I can tell, is a mild form of what the Cultural Revolutionaries in China used to call "re-education." You are taught the new, the correct values. You are assured that, in order to make any headway with your life, you must not only subscribe to but enact these values in your daily life. For better or worse, the expression of existential anomie is no longer tolerated in Western society.
Largely, perhaps, because everyone got tired of the Butleys of the world. Brilliant, bitter, committed to drunken malingering, Butley has nothing to do, really, save wait for death. He fills his hours with repartee, seduction, and evasion. If he can avoid teaching - he has taught at Cambridge, but has slid somewhat to London University - he will. Students are as disagreeable to him as mosquitoes. His love life is a shambles, and soon in ruins; if Butley has learned anything in the course of the play, it's that he doesn't have the energy to try to kindle something new. He is terminally disaffected.
He is also, however, extremely entertaining. Butley is an aggressive troublemaker, gifted with a fluent tongue that's capable of many modes of speech. His head is stuffed with poetry that he can rattle off by the yard. (If you ask me, his misery owes to the fact that, for some reason or other, there came a time when Butley stopped learning new lines.) He is a one-man George-and-Martha, conducting a war of attrition against himself while only appearing to take on the other people in the room. He is dishonest, disloyal, insincere and cruel, but these are not so much character flaws as battle wounds. Butley's downfall, such as it is, comes across as sad as it is inevitable.
Continue reading about Butley at Portico.
