How often do we talk about something being “normal” in everyday life - a certain behavior, an appearance or even a product. But who actually defined this normality? Nature? If we actually based our standards of normality on how our ancestors lived several thousand years ago, civilized coexistence without violence, robbery and manslaughter would be unimaginable. Or what, pray tell, is natural about a pumpkin cream iced shaken espresso? Isn't civilization much more the opposite of nature? A human imposition to put a stop to chaos and bring order to our coexistence. “Normal” seems to be based less on natural guidelines than on social conventions and traditional values. But if, for example, an idea such as inheritance law is not a natural inevitability or divine directive, but rather just a human imposition, could we not simply abolish it if it turns out to be bad for the majority of humanity?
The idea that we humans are the masters of our own happiness and hold our destiny in our hands holds some explosive power. Social norms not only ensure that everything stays as it is or as it supposedly always was - they also ensure that those who have always been on top stay on top. Rarely do we encounter a voice in the theater that is able to cast more doubt on our concepts of “normality” and “naturalness” than Joe Orton. In his plays, he demonstrates how frighteningly superficial and brazenly seemingly eternal values and norms can be defined and interpreted and how elastic the truth can be when it has to be. Orton shows us that society and civilization are arbitrary human inventions - and he also shows us the fuse with which they can be blown up if necessary. The battlefield he chooses for this is sexuality: here his heteronormative citizen-creatures expose themselves through their own instincts. But the fact that his basic idea can also be thought on a much bigger scale makes Joe Orton and his work much more dangerous than the typical sex comedy that "What the butler saw" appears to be at first glance.
starring: Jörg Zirnstein, Aleksandra Kienitz, Gabriele Drechsel, Sebastian Schulze, Florian Donath, Hubert Schlemmer
director: Andreas Merz
set- and costume design: Veronika Bleffert and Sonja Füsti
dramaturgy: Marlon Tarnow
photos: Sinah Osner
What the Butler saw, Orton
Staatstheater Darmastadt, Darmstadt, Germany
„You're in a madhouse. Unusual behavior is the order of the day. We have no priviledged class here. It's democratic lunacy we practise.“
Joe Orton's work is inseparably linked to his biography. As a young gay man in England in the 1960s, he was confronted on a daily basis with a society in which homosexuality was considered a mental illness. And so his work is also a fundamental challenge to a heteronormative world, which condemns and punishes all deviations from its seemingly immovable norms as pathological, perverted and criminal: If you say I'm perverted, then you are at least as much!