The resolution of Joe Orton's What the Butler Saw

Sticky stories: Joe Orton, queer history, queer dramaturgy

“…As such, it is clear that Orton's works might only awkwardly fit the definition of queer dramaturgy above because they are literary -they have, for instance, been linked to the structure of tragedy (Evans 2014) and in other places to (albeit problematically) 'universality' (Streit 2004, 252) and farce has a long literary history. And although elements of his works for some of the 1980s and 1990s were very queer because of resounding parallels between the two periods, time moves on and those re-soundings lose their intensity.…”