Review by Melissa Blease
Theatre Royal Bath until Saturday 19 October
On paper, Richard O’Brien’s tongue-in-cheek, rock’n’roll homage to the schlock-horror science fiction B-movies that rose to popularity in the 1950s shouldn’t really be the enduringly popular success story that it is: the storyline is nonsensical, the sets take us back to the days when painted hardboard was all it took to transport audiences to another world and the script has never been updated to address contemporary attitudes around our increasingly nuanced understanding of gender fluidity.
But this unashamedly loud, lusty, live experience is a global phenomenon – and, in the hands of vintage Rocky Horror Show director Christopher Luscombe, it’s as fresh, feisty and downright fabulous as it was when it premiered at London’s Royal Court Theatre back in 1973.
On the show’s opening night in Bath this time around, the sight of Rocky Horror devotees – many of them wearing scanty underwear deliberately unconcealed by French maid’s outfits, white lab coats and/or fright night make up – in queues that snaked halfway across Saw Close as they waited to get past the bag checks (audiences are not permitted to bring flour or confetti into the theatre; those ‘in the know’ will know why) was a spectacle indeed. But – lab coats? Scanty underwear? What’s going on? Here goes…
For Rocky Horror Show ‘virgins’ who have come late to this party, the plot goes something like this: geeky Brad and his demure fiancee Janet set off to visit their former high school science teacher Dr Scott – and end up stranded with a flat tyre on a stormy night somewhere in the countryside. But hey: didn’t they pass a castle a few miles back down the road? Yes indeed, they did.
And so, to cut a long, unlikely story short, Brad and Janet swiftly become key characters in the arcane empire ruled by mad, bad, misunderstood ‘sweet transvestite’ Frank, abetted by his dysfunctional ‘family’: sinister servant Riff Raff, licentious maid Magenta, tap dancing good-time girl Columbia, Frank’s brand new creation Rocky, Frank and Columbia’s former lover and play-thing Eddie and, eventually, Dr Scott, who also ‘happens to be’ Eddie’s uncle… oh, and a government investigator of UFO business.
Frank concludes that the flat tyre/stormy night set-up could only be part of a vast conspiracy to out him as a former resident of Transexual Transylvania (an alien planet rather than a particularly liberated region of Eastern Europe) and total, utter chaos ensues, resulting in an absurd, non-stop erotic cabaret of song and dance laden with lashings of surreal savoir-faire.
While comparisons with Tim Curry – who bought Frank to fully fabulous life in both the original stage show and the 1975 film version of the musical, turning him into an enduring popular pin-up boy for subculture generations to come – are inevitable, Donovan’s take on the iconic, lynchpin role of the sexy psychopath with a penchant for perverted parties is very much all his own work: a hyper-camp hybrid of Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker and vintage Alice Cooper with a manic, saturnine edge that turns melodramatically mawkish as the plot gathers pace; Donovan, it seems, was made to be Frank.
As Brad and Janet, Lauren Chia and Alexander Hetherington slip out of their buttoned-up, ‘innocents-lost-in-the-maelstrom’ personas and into their jezebel jim-jams faster than Frank can turn on his high heels. Natasha Hoeberigs is a polished, seductive Magenta, Job Greuter’s Riff Raff thrillingly repulsive but oddly compelling, Jayme-Lee Zanoncelli taps into Columbia’s super-kooky freakiness with panache and Morgan Jackson as Frank’s beautiful half-brained creation Rocky is hunky perfection personified; you may be transfixed by his leopard-print budgie smugglers, but even they won’t distract you from his mind-blowing back-flips.
Meanwhile, a four-strong troupe of cavorting ‘phantoms’ add extra layers of dynamism and gothic grandeur throughout, and Narrator Nathan Caton acts as faultless tour guide throughout the whole yarn, batting away preposterous ripostes from Rocky Horror Show veterans in the audience with quick-fire ripostes of his own.
Puerile, preposterous and profligate, filthy, fickle and funny:The Rocky Horror Show proves that it is indeed possible to do The Time Warp again, and again, and again, ad infinitum. And, once you’ve seen Jason Donovan teetering around the stage in high heels, fishnet stockings and a satin G-string, you’ll never be able to un-see the sight; personally, however, I never want to…
Featured image: Jason Donovan as Frank ‘n’ Furter and Company
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