A sight to make an old manservant young

THEATRE What the Butler Saw National Theatre, London

"Radical thoughts come easily to the lunatic," says one of the crazed psychiatrists in Joe Orton's darkly anarchic farce, adeptly revived by Phyllida Lloyd. It is this combination of mad humour and radical subversion, both as potent as ever, that makes What the Butler Saw endure.

John Alderton plays Dr Prentice, a complacent psychiatrist in a private clinic first seen interviewing a new secretary with languid paternalism. Within minutes he is asking her to undress ("I've never undressed in front of a man before," she says. "I'll take account of your inexperience in these matters," he responds reassuringly). The unscheduled arrival, first of Mrs Prentice and then of a government inspector, Dr Rance, leads quickly to the need for Prentice to conceal the poor woman's underwear and shoes in strategic places around his office.

And so the roller-coaster begins. Alderton's performance is remarkably restrained - as indeed is the whole production - which is reassuring for non-farce lovers. Inevitably much of the comedy relies on a frenzy of dressing, undressing and cross-dressing, but this conventional form has been applied to a world devoid of the usual moral and social conventions. So often farce seems to be bolstering the very double-standards and oppressions it apparently mocks, but here the spiralling amorality and sexual adventurousness effectively blow open the whole set-up, even by today's knowing standards.

Richard Wilson is spectacularly lugubrious as the old rou Rance. With the protection his white coat and plummy accent afford, he is free to indulge the wildest of professional abuses and delusions. In the context of free-fall sexual licence, his astonishing misogyny, condescension and libertinism still give rise to gasps of laughter. Meanwhile, his obsession with incest, and his determination to force his interpretation of events in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, leads to an all-too contemporary indictment of aspects of the medical profession.

As the licentious Mrs Prentice, Nicola Pagett is easily a match for the lecherous males. Magnificently louche in black silk slip and overcoat at the beginning of the play, she weakens only when the demands of the part limit her to screaming loudly every time she sets eyes on yet another nude male. Within the limits of the role, Debra Gillett is also excellent as the hapless secretary, whose predicament is complicated when a policeman arrives claiming she is harbouring Winston Churchill's genitals, ever since an intimate accident which befell her grandmother and a statue of the great man.

All farce palls at some time for all but the most avid devotees, but it is testament to both Orton and Lloyd that it doesn't happen more often here. The cast all turn in crisp and unfussy performances, Mark Thompson's set is askew but discretely so, and none of it detracts from the radical, lunatic logic of the writing. Only in the final moments does Lloyd allow some pyrotechnics of both acting, design and special effects. The final, blood-spattered, semi-naked tableau is triumphantly subversive.

n Box-office: 0171-928 2252

n A shorter version of this review appeared in late editions of yesterday's Independent