Butley

By: Amos Lassen

"Butley"
Left Alone
Amos Lassen
"His wife just left him for another man. And so did his boyfriend." Director Harold Pinter's 1973 drama Butley is an entertaining and revealing film of one of the Seventies most ear-catching London West End theatre plays, based on the original drama by Simon Gray. Alan Bates stuns in his waspish and well-mannered performance as troubled English professor, Ben Butley, whose life starts falling apart.
Once upon a time and somewhere in his alcoholic past Ben Butley was an authority on T.S. Eliot. "But now his photograph of Eliot is peeling from the wall, and Butley is peeling, too." Butley peels off one layer, and then another, and finally comes down to his self-hating, desperately lonely core.
Butley is an affecting characters of modern theater. He tries to bind people to himself with sarcasm, insult, and a merciless eye for their vulnerabilities. It seems that he always fails. However Alan Bates plays him with his mind is still resilient and quick saving humor. We don't pity him, even though we should. He somehow weathers each crisis, and we even feel a bit of affection for him.
The film takes place during a day in an office shared by two English instructors at Queen Mary's College, London. One is Butley, who, is approaching middle age and he has abandoned the difficulties of Eliot and taken up nursery rhymes. The other is Joey, who was Butley's protégé, then became his roommate, and then (after Butley's marriage and separation) became his roommate again. Joey is a mess and Butley spends his day in psychological warfare against the truths that would batter him down. His wife tells him she intends to marry another man. Bad enough. But then Joey acknowledges that he's leaving, too also for another man. Butley faces being left totally alone, and he fights back with wit, with obscenity, with insult, with .
Butley was born lonely. He needs to have somebody there. After his marriage fails, he needs Joey again, because Joey had at least admired him at one time. It doesn't really seem to be relevant that Joey is a homosexual; Butley's needs are not sexual but psychological. Butley doesn't have much affection for women. He has some feeling left for his wife, but conceals it well, and he has contempt for the other women. The spinster Byron scholar (Jessica Tandy) and the would-be tutorial student (Georgina Hale). He doesn't do much better with the men. His loneliness seems to be asexual, if anything. He is unable to face his hungers and needs not until the end, anyway, when he makes an oblique but honest assessment of his current situation. He attempts to keep Joey by attacking his weaknesses, and he taunts Reg, Joey's new friend, in a futile attempt to drive him away. He's a wonder with words, and even during the most pathetic scenes, he still somehow doesn't lose the poetry.
Bates gives the character much more spirit that the material giving us the feeling that he who will stay on his feet no matter what.