Yesterday’s kitsch has become today’s avant-garde. Anything way in the thirties seems wildly way out in the seventies. And for proof you need only turn to Richard O’Brien’s musical fantasy, The Rocky Horror Show at the Theatre Upstairs, Royal Court, which is saturated in old celluloid: in particular, Karloff’s Frankenstein and stair-creaking creepies like The Old Dark House. Even the theatre seats have the faded plush of past Odeons and you are piloted towards them by masked ushers.
Normally I find camp exploitations of old movies highly resistible because they imply a wholly unjustified feeling of cultural superiority. But this show won me over entirely because it achieves the rare feat of being witty and erotic at the same time. Dealing with a couple of virginal innocents who find themselves trapped in a crazy-house run by a trans-sexual doctor. it accurately spoofs the strip-bubble dialogue of the James Whale classics (We’ll play along for now and pull out our aces when the time is right,” says the spectacled hero cornered by lowering transvestite monsters). And the various sexual permutations and combinations, suggested by coupling silhouettes, have a gaudy mathematical intricacy.
Unlike Sam Shepard (to whom he owes much) O’Brien never suggests his blend of sci-fi and movie iconography has any very serious purpose; “Don’t dream it, be it” is the closest he gets to a theme. But, in compensation, he bounces the action along on a series of springy rock numbers and Jim Sharman’s audience-enveloping production is a deft piece of Pop-Artaud. Tim Curry also gives a garishly Bowiesque performance as the ambisextrous doctor but for me the actor of the evening was Jonathan Adams as the Narrator: a bulky, heavy-jowled Kissinger-like figure who enters into the rock numbers with the stately aplomb of a dowager duchess doing a strip.
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