In the year of the Royal Court’s 50th birthday celebrations, the people’s choice as their favourite production since
Look Back in Anger was nothing by John Osborne, Arnold Wesker, Edward Bond, David Hare or Caryl Churchill; it was the sci-fi rock spoof that opened without any expectations in the tiny upstairs studio on June 19, 1973.
I remember the date because I was there. On that same day I paid a visit to the optician (hoping to see things a little more clearly) and freeloaded a few glasses of champagne on a Thames river trip hosted by Richard Attenborough on behalf of a muscular dystrophy charity. In the evening I went on to see Edward Bond’s The Sea (starring Coral Browne and Ian Holm) in Sloane Square, followed by a late-night premiere of a new musical nobody knew anything about in the Theatre Upstairs.
The sight of Tim Curry crawling across a gantry dressed in a leather jacket, fishnet tights and a black suspender belt was, I suppose, a bit of a surprise, but not really — when I got round to thinking about it — in those theatrical cross-dressing glam-rock days of David Bowie, Lindsay Kemp (Bowie’s mentor) and T Rex; it was just that the theatre took a little time to catch up. The Royal Court itself, a seedbed of Puritanism and left-wing demagoguery, was not the obvious place for the eruption. Even the resident directors were taken aback by the ferocity of the show’s success.
What was the root of that success? Howard Panter, chief executive of the Ambassadors Theatre Group, which is producing the current new version, believes that the overriding message contained in the song Don’t Dream It, Be It, is the key. “The audience always goes mad, of course, but they are quiet during the song itself. This is where audience and show come together in a mutual orgasm of sexual and political freedom.”
“I’m a sweet transvestite from transsexual Transylvania,” sang Curry as Frank N Furter, frizzy-haired queen of the tempest-tossed castle where the American innocents abroad, Brad Majors and Janet Weiss, fetch up with tyre trouble en route to visit an old college professor. One of the all-time great rock-theatre songs, shifting time signatures along with its melodic invention, There’s a Light (Over at the Frankenstein Place), leads them, and us, into a nether world of higher fantasy.
The musical, originally scheduled for a five-week run, moved down the King’s Road to a converted cinema for several years and then conquered the world. “It’s a fairytale,” says the show’s author and composer Richard O’Brien, who appeared as the sinister Riff Raff in the first production, “a reworking of Babes in the Wood. You could see Brad and Janet as Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. It’s about growing up, sitting on the cusp of pubescence; it’s also a very nice rock and roll show.”
It did not appear entirely from left field. O’Brien had been appearing in the West End chorus of Jesus Christ, Superstar — along with the equally unknown Diane Langton, Floella Benjamin and Elaine Paige — and was poised to take over as Herod (he was the understudy), whom he envisaged as a diabolic transvestite. Instead, the role was passed on to Victor Spinetti sporting a straw boater.
The director, Jim Sharman, consoled O’Brien with the promise that they would work together again soon, which they did, on a Sam Shepard play, The Unseen Hand, in the Theatre Upstairs in 1972. By that time Rocky Horror was incubating, as a response O’Brien had developed in anger with the Australian producer of Superstar Robert Stigwood, the man behind the Bee Gees.
So there is a way in which one can see Rocky Horror as a direct legacy of Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber. Outside the mainstream British musical, beyond Cats and Oliver!, there have been two eccentrically stylised shows that have maintained a worldwide audience: Sandy Wilson’s The Boy Friend (which was once said to receive a revival somewhere in the world every six minutes, and which returns to Regent’s Park this summer) and O’Brien’s Rocky Horror Show.
Recent tours have starred Jason Donovan and Jonathan Wilkes. Celebrity guest narrators on the touring production coming to the Playhouse on Wednesday have included Nigel Planer, Russ Abbot, Michael Aspel, Andy Gray (the Sky football commentator) and Christopher Biggins. The new Janet is Suzanne Shaw from Hear’Say.
The show, in short, has become part of our cultural fabric, a sort of boil that needs bursting in performance every so often, an open invitation, as O’Brien puts it, “to fish out the fishnets, buff up your basque and sharpen those stilettos”. It is currently licensed for performance in Budapest, Athens, South Korea and Bratislava. Panter says that when the Berlin Wall came down there was a three-day spontaneous Rocky Horror-inspired party on the streets. In November he saw three separate productions in Germany within a half-hour’s drive of each other.
Recently, the theme of liberation has taken a new twist in the show’s affiliation with Amnesty International. The celebratory gala performance at the Royal Court in May underlined the message of personal freedom and also reminded audiences that a serious theatre such as the Royal Court may have lost that mid-1970s post-fringe sense of fun in its new-work policy. In our culturally partitioned times, The Rocky Horror Show can express a spirit of breakthrough, and of surprise, that is still rare. The latest Rocky Horror Show, faithful to the original show, started out in Brighton three months ago and will return to the road after its three-month summer season at the Playhouse.
“It was about the right time to take out all the improvements and go right back to basics,” O’Brien says. Howard Panter concurs. “A lot of it, I admit, had become extremely vulgar. We are going right back to the characters and that strange, fragile atmosphere of the B-movie world. In North America they still think the show came after the movie, which is ridiculous. The movie’s great, of course. But the theatre is where these dreams, and the show’s meaning, really exist.”
O’Brien, who has lately divorced his second wife, Jane, is working on a new show, The Stripper, which is allegedly his Raymond Chandler musical and not a sequel to Rocky Horror.
At the Royal Court gala performance it was odd to contemplate the acclaim for a piece that was just a cheap little filler in a long-forgotten summer. People in the audience wore the costumes of the characters, joined in the songs, yelped with self-identification. Like all the best theatre, the musical corroborates our right to exist and our need to acknowledge the fact. Rocky, the symbolic creation of the mad scientist, is proof that the freak in us all is the beautiful fruit of our imaginative fantasy. No play of Edward Bond and Caryl Churchill goes quite that far, which is why the audience poll of the Court’s greatest plays stuck its thumbs up for a camp musical.
I was pondering all this the other day with Patricia Quinn, widow of the late Sir Robert Stephens, and the show’s original Magenta. She had no idea that the show would be the success it became, and she still turns up loyally for promotional events and premieres. Her magnified usherette’s lips are to be seen in a box set video of the show. “Well, it was all too much, of course, and the whole journey has been amazing. But, you know, we never thought we were doing a silly old musical. We thought we were performing in Chekhov.”
The Rocky Horror Show opens on Wednesday at the Playhouse, London WC2 (0870 0606631)
The original cast: where are they now?
Tim Curry (Frank N. Furter) keeps a beautiful garden in Hollywood.
Richard O’Brien (author and Riff Raff) starred in The Crystal Maze on TV.
Julie Covington (Janet) was in Rock Follies on TV.
Patricia Quinn (usherette and Magenta) is about to play Dorothy Parker at the Charleston festival.
Nell Campbell (Columbia) recently returned to Sydney.
Rayner Bourton (Rocky) is reconciled to growing older gracefully.
