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In Simon Gray's Butley we watch for two hours as protagonist Ben Butley, an obviously intelligent and sensitive man, systematically antagonizes and alienates everyone with whom he comes in contact. He seems determined to make the world hate him and by the play's end he has achieved his ruinously self-destructive goal. The question naturally generated by such an agon, a question never explicitly addressed in the text, is “Why?” The answer, I should like to argue, is that Butley is engaged in an intense, private psychic conflict, a psychomachia which drives him to revile his wife, his students, his colleagues, the profession of English and the world at large in a desperate effort to exorcise a wholly personal demon.
In critical commentary on the play, both journalistic and scholarly, Butley's personal life has, with few exceptions, been either falsely reported, discounted or ignored altogether. In the first category are the numerous reports that Butley is, or once was, the homosexual lover of his office-mate, and former student, Joey.1 Though it must be granted that the text is somewhat ambiguous, the evidence against Butley's being an active homosexual far outweighs the evidence in favor of such a conclusion. In support of the homosexual hypothesis there is only the fact that Butley lives with Joey, who clearly is homosexual. The argument that Butley therefore must be Joey's lover is one that ought to recommend itself only to those whose thinking on the subject of lifestyles is rigidly conventional. Board is not bed, and the only thing that the text tells us unequivocally is that the two colleagues share the former. That they do not and never have shared the latter can be inferred from a number of textual data.
If Butley has been Joey's lover, Butley's wife Anne is