[1] The title character, a T. S. Eliot scholar, is an alcoholic who loses his wife and his close friend and colleague – and possibly male lover – on the same day.

[2] The action of the dark comedy takes place over several hours on the same day during which he bullies students, friends and colleagues while falling apart at the seams.

[7] The show cast Hayward Morse (Joseph Keyston), Geraldine Sherman (Miss Heasman), Barbara Lester (Edna Shaft), Holland Taylor (Anne Butley), Roger Newman (Reg Nuttall), and Christopher Hastings (Mr Gardner).

The extraordinary thing about Butley, it still seems to me, is that the play gives us a character who hurls himself towards the destruction while living, in the fever of his intellectual hell, with a vitality and brilliance known to few of us.

[1]A 1974 film adaptation Butley directed by Pinter starred Alan Bates, Jessica Tandy, Richard O'Callaghan, Susan Engel, and Michael Byrne.