RICHARD I was never interest
Planet’
RICHARD O’BRIEN – instantly recognisable to some, “just a thin bald man” (in his words) to others – is trying to explain the lasting appeal of his most famous creation, The Rocky Horror Show. Since its debut in a tiny upstairs theatre in London in 1973 it has not only been performed pretty much continuously across the world but, following the 1975 film adaptation, its gloriously camp combination of catchy songs, outrageous crossdressing and hammy B-movie plot has become a part of our modern cultural fabric.
“It’s like an alternative pantomime,” he says. “It even has a panto dame figure. I remember when we were doing the movie our producer asked me: what are the most famous films to come out of Great Britain? And the answer was: Carry On, and Hammer House Of Horror. And Rocky is a bit of a combination of both those genres.”
But despite the enormous cultural impact the play, and then film, has had in its exploration of themes including sexuality and gender identity, O’Brien maintains that at heart it simply remains “a bit of fun”.
“It was essentially a fringe theatre event, and somehow it has always felt like it has stayed like that,” he says. “It’s never had the full Andrew Lloyd Webber treatment – and I think that’s what’s kept it going in a way, it’s had this special cachet that’s kept it somehow a bit risky. It’s not shocking so much as naughty, I think. Childishly so, perhaps. Titillatingly, adolescently naughty, that’s where we were coming from. It’s not a sex show, it’s just… juvenile.
“In fact it failed on Broadway. I remember at the time the famous critic Rex Reed dismissed it as ‘just a play for homosexuals’, which I thought was a bit rich. I was on radio the next day and I explained how his words had really upset both my wife and my boyfriend.”
The plot of the musical certainly comes out of left field. It tells the story of a newly engaged couple, Brad and Janet, getting caught with a flat tyre in a storm and taking shelter in the home of a mad transvestite scientist called Dr Frank-N-Furter.
As their innocence is lost, Brad and Janet meet a houseful of wild characters, including a rocking biker and a creepy butler. Through elaborate dances and rock songs, Frank-NFurter unveils his latest creation: a muscular man named Rocky Horror.
Wacky it may be but it took a man of fierce intelligence who didn’t take himself too seriously to create it. And when he describes the process by which the show came about, his dismissively breezy manner belies what, on closer analysis, was nothing less than an extraordinary achievement.
After coming to London from New Zealand in the mid-1960s with the intention of making it as an actor, by 1973 O’Brien was struggling. Roles as a horse-riding stuntman in Carry On