Syndicated Interview
Richard O’Brien
How does it feel to be talking about Rocky Horror still after all this time?
I have no problems talking about Rocky. Rocky Horror is one of those great joys in my life
because it’s a great joy in other people’s lives. One of the nicest things about being in this
business is I love the fact that show comes into town and it cheers people up.
I wouldn’t want to be sitting here if I was just flogging a show for the sake of flogging it. That
would really embarrass me. I really am sincere. If the band is cooking and the audience is
laughing, I’m kinda happy. It’s not quite as simple as that, you want excellence. And one of the
things I’ve discovered in the last few weeks while we’ve been auditioning for Rocky and The
Stripper is that Britain really does have talent. There’s some fucking good talent.
One day we were auditioning for The Stripper and it was almost an embarrassment of riches.
People came and sang for Richard Hartley, my writing partner, and I at 10.30 in the morning,
and we were leaking tears from the corners of our eyes as this girl was singing. Not only has she
got all the pressure of auditioning, she’s just got out of bed and she turned up and sang like an
angel. It sends shivers down your spine. It’s so wonderful. It makes me want to weep.
That’s what I like about Rocky it keeps employing young artists, young singers and it keeps
giving people in the towns a nice week of ‘let’s go and see the show’. Groups of people, from
offices and the like, often go as a party and it’s party time. What a wonderful thing to be giving
people pleasure for 30 years.
So to answer your question the long way round it gives me a great deal of pleasure to talk about
Rocky Horror and I hope The Stripper is going to give people as much pleasure.
How involved are you in the staging of Rocky now? Do you still like to be hands on?
Well, thankfully this time round with Rocky I haven’t had to be too hands on and that’s given
me the freedom to concentrate on The Stripper. That’s simply because there are two people
involved this time I know I can trust completely. One is Christopher Luscombe, our director,
who directed it the last time round and did a splendid job and understood exactly what was
going on. And David Bedella is playing Frank ‘N’ Furter again and David was terrific;
controlled, sensible, witty and intelligent. With the two of them at the helm I didn’t really have
to worry very much and I can concentrate on The Stripper as a result.
You’re still attached enough to the piece that you want to get it exactly right, then?
Yeah. I would really hate to think that an audience was being short changed and one of the
other things with Rocky, that one always has to bear in mind, is some of the audience, many of
the audience, have seen it before but even more of the audience have never seen it before. What
I don’t ever want to happen is the people who haven’t seen it before to feel like they are sitting
at a party that they haven’t been invited to. It was getting a bit like that at one stage which is
why we were sent to try and rescue it and take it back away from the fans owning the show to
the people on stage owning the show. The people on stage were feeling all at sea because the
audience had taken over the show.
Rocky Horror has its own culture in a way, hasn’t it? The fans have created their own
experience and script for themselves. How do you feel about that?
I think it’s splendid. It’s lovely. But it’s not for them alone. I think the more responsible fans
understand that too because if they’re not getting a good show, the best show possible, even
they’re dipping out aren’t they? And if they want the best show possible, they have to allow the
people on stage to give them just that. I think we’ve got the balance right now so everybody can
enjoy it.
A good sound system is essential and high-energy theatrical performances are very important.
We know it’s artificial, but within a couple of minutes we buy into it and the energy level rises
and the body language becomes more extreme, but we love it.
How has Rocky Horror evolved? Is there going to be anything new this time?
I hope not. If it ain’t broke, don’t try to fix it. We did introduce a few years ago a condom into
the bedroom scenes, which are farcical anyway, but I don’t think we’ve done that for a few
years. We actually introduced it so not to be irresponsible, we wanted to encourage safe sex if
people were going to get a little frisky after seeing the show,
The show has that effect?
It can do and there’s nothing wrong with that, but we haven’t done that for a few years because
it seems a little bit finger wagging to some extent. I think anybody with any sense doesn’t need
telling anyway.
How did the whole fan interaction thing start?
It started with the movie. It started, apparently, in New York City, in Greenwich Village. I think
somebody yelled a line at the stage and it got a small snigger of approval and the next night
somebody else tried a line and it was like wildfire. It got to one stage, Sal Pero was the chap
who was the Rocky Horror principal player in New York City and he was telling me (Richard
adopts comedy New Yorker thesp accent) ‘The strange thing Richard, someone would shout
out a new line in New York and the very next night someone is shouting it out in Hollywood.
Isn’t that incredible?’ So it is kind of interesting.
It was a very strange phenomenon. Very, very odd and quite wonderful. Almost like a liturgy.
I’m not saying it was a religious experience but it wasn’t dissimilar. Somebody would say
something and then the response from audience, or if you like congregation, it wasn’t terribly
dissimilar. Because it had no theological roots (laughs) it was interesting.
Are you au fait with their cues and the lines they shout?
Some of them. But some of them are quite disgusting and when I’ve been on stage and I played
Frank a couple of times, when we were at the Picadilly and Tim McInnerney’s back went, it
was difficult because some of it is really rather crude. They would pre-empt your line so not
only did you have to put up with the awfulness of the line, you also kind of bought into it.
You’ve become their patsy and it was completely unpleasant. The first time you go ‘urrrgggh,
you’ve made me your fool’.
I wonder if they ever thought about it from a performers point of view?
It’s an odd relationship between the hardened fans and Rocky, it was quite odd because there
was a certain amount of contempt but there was love in the contempt. It was a very strange
relationship they built with the piece. They liked the corniness of the whole thing, that’s what
engaged them in the first place, and then they got to kind of dislike the fact they liked it and
had this uneasy kind of relationship so most of their comments became very crude and almost a
form of ridicule which added to the whole thing. I don’t think some of them quite understood
their relationship, whether they really liked it, disliked it or loved disliking it, disliked loving it
- I don’t know.
I can’t think of any other shows which have developed that way, can you?
Not on the same organic level. They did do Sound of Music. Graham Norton, I think, started
something showing the movie in Leicester Square and people dressed up as nuns and Nazis,
but a conceptual thought process went into that. Whereas with Rocky it was an organic process,
a very different journey, and at times transcended the art of movies.
I saw it at the Coldron Convention Hall in Long Island, very early, 1977 or somewhere or other
at a convention event where they showed the movies after. Little Nell was there, Pat Quinn,
Meatloaf was there, I think even Tim [Curry] and Susan [Sarandon] turned up at that one. We
were all there and in the evening and we’d never seen it with the interaction with the fans. It
was a proper theatre stage, so the screen was back a bit and there was a forestage the ghost cast
could act on in front of the screen behind them. At one stage, there was a girl called Dori
Hartley playing Tim’s role, playing Frank ‘N’ Furter, and she did look a lot like Tim Curry, very
much like him, and she sat on the edge of the stage during the bit where Tim sits on the steps at
the end of the movie when he’s singing I’m Going Home, and he’s wiping eye make-up off with
the backs of his hands on celluloid, and she was sitting on the edge of the stage with a low
spotlight shining up at her, miming the actions exactly the same. So you had celluloid, live
figure and then, by sheer accident, a silhouette blown up onto the screen next to Tim Curry,
almost exactly she same size. There was Tim on film, this shadow figure next to him following
his movements precisely and then this real person on the front of the stage and people in the
audience with lighters singing . You couldn’t organise it. You’d spend days trying to get that
right and here it was by happy accident. It was kind of wonderful.
Did you have fun making the film?
I think we did. It was a quick shoot. It was six weeks and that was quite quick. Luckily, of
course, most of us knew the show back to front as we’d played it on stage. That was one of the
nice things about us being fairly close together in a family kind of sense. Then Barry Bostwick
and Susan being brought in alienated them even further, so we really were a separate kind of
group. They were the people coming into the strange world and that worked very well, I
thought.
It was terribly cold. I think we finished a week or two before Christmas and it was wet. Susan
came down with a dreadful, dreadful cold right at the end when she had to go to the swimming
pool and get out and do Wild and Untamed Thing. This girl was a real trooper. You’d never
know that she was ill, but she was terribly ill. I think we had a good time. You’re so busy
working that you don’t realise you’re having a good time until it’s all over (laughs).
You wrote Rocky Horror while working in the theatre with Jim Sharman. Did you find that
an enjoyable process?
I did actually. I studied play structure at drama school and kind of knew it in general terms but
writing Rocky was the first thing I had ever written, so I learned a lot in the rehearsal period.
Then when Jim Sharman and I went away to do the screenplay together I found that I became a
kind of creative secretary. I didn’t mind that at all. He’d say ‘I think I would like to see so and
so, and approach it from this kind of angle, now write the scene. What do you think?’ He’d give
his ideas and I became the creative secretary and I really rather liked that process. It was kind of
cool because I was not only helping him create his vision but I was having creative input. I
wasn’t just a secretary where I took down notes of what he said, he was able to fire my
imagination. I learned quite a bit from that. It’s a craft at the end of the day and it was
enjoyable.
How did you come across the original idea for Rocky Horror?
I used to love watching the late-night B movies on television in the late 60s, early 70s. BBC2
used to shut down at midnight as did ITV, there wasn’t a Channel 4 in those days. At 11.30pm
at night, the only people watching television were night owls, people like myself ,and so they
didn’t bother with putting anything on that had cost a great deal of money, they put on a creaky
old movie.
That was my time and I used to like it very much. I’d have a jazz cigarette (laughs) and watch a
B-movie and I used to just roar with laughter at how they used to take themselves so seriously,
and it became unintentionally funny. That’s what I wanted to capture and write about, one of
those B-movies that made us laugh.
Strangely when we went to make the movie, away from the stage, we realised we were treading
a tightrope situation. On stage everyone knew we were parodying these B-movies and sci-fi
movies, but taking it back to film how do we let people know this is not just a bad movie and
yet don’t dare make the comment that we are parodying it? It’s got to be played for real, no
comment must be made, once you do it nudge-nudge you’ve lost the point. So that was
interesting.
We got to Bray to the House of Hammer. Our line producer said ‘It’s interesting Richard, you
do realise the most successful British movies of all time, what they are, don’t you?’ Ooh I don’t
know, Korda, Ealing? He said: ‘Neither. Hammer House of Horror and Carry On movies.’ And
if you think about it, Rocky Horror is almost a combination of those two things. Which is
fascinating, isn’t it?
We struck a chord. It took America a little longer to catch onto the joke. They weren’t quite sure
how to market it actually, 20th Century Fox. Strangely that movie, of course, they did want to
pull the plug on it. Alan Ladd Jr was the head of 20th Century Fox by the time we went into
production and he wanted to ditch it, he didn’t want the studio to make Rocky Horror. He
thought it was trashy and he didn’t like it at all. However it was too late, it was too late for him
to make that call, the green light had gone on and we’d stepped over a point of no return
So that was interesting, he came to the set a disgruntled unhappy man and then the film was
released and they didn’t know where their target audience was, how they were to sell it, who
to sell it to, they had no idea. It kind of went down the tubes and Alan Ladd Jr felt vindicated,
and said ‘I told you.’
And then it started doing that late-night business, played for 25/30 years and became one of the
most successful movies in 20th Century Fox’s history.
So The Stripper, that’s something you wrote a while ago. Why are you bringing it back?
I think the best way to treat the last outing of The Stripper is to treat it as a workshop. We did it
30 years ago now, at Sydney Theatre Company, we did a version of it. There were two
wonderful acts in it, two wonderful performers; Terry Donovan, Jason Donovan’s father, played
Al Wheeler and he was magnificent and the girl who played our Mexican Sherry Mendez was
brilliant, with a heart-breakingly beautiful, fabulous voice. So some good things came out of it
but it was overlong, overwritten and the director up there made me write songs for costume
changes. I kept going ‘that doesn’t help it dramatically, writing a song for a costume change is
not good news‘. It didn’t quite work so since then I’ve cut it dramatically and lost a character
altogether, Richard and I have taken four or five songs at out and there are at least three new
songs. I really am looking forward to it.
Can you sum The Stripper up to newcomers to the story?
It’s a dime novel, pulp fiction detective tale set in 1961 with lots of jazz music, it’s populist,
burlesque and bullets, tits and guns. What I really want is people to come out of the theatre and
go ‘that was the coolest fucking evening I have ever spent in my entire life’. And I want every
girl in the audience to look at Al Wheeler to say ‘ooh yeah’ and every boy in the audience to say
‘I wish I was him’. He’s funny, he’s laconic. It’s a marathon, he’s in every scene, he narrates,
sings 14 songs. If it’s scary for me, it’s evens scarier for him.
You’re performing in this show too. Why did you decide to appear in it?
I’m only going to be in it by accident. I’d forgotten to put one of the cast on the cast list and
when they did the budget they hadn’t budgeted for another actor and while that conversation
was going on I said ‘ well, why don’t I play that‘. It’s only a small part. I’m going to be in the
theatre every night. I’m not just going to go on opening night and walk away and the pick it up
once a week for the next five weeks, I’m going to be there every night. I’ve put a lot of creative
energy and juice into this. I really want to see this very sexy and joyful business, so I may as
well be in the company as well. The downside of that is, I was going to be a lot harder on
people’s vocal harmonies if I wasn’t in it, because I was allowed to be. And now, I can’t really
point the finger unless I’m damned good myself (laughs). I’m looking forward to it.
What’s the music going to be like? Cool?
We don’t want any of that showbiz stuff, that (starts singing like Ethel Merman) ‘New York
song, singing a song, a New York song‘. We don’t want any of that crap, I hate it. The four
freshman male jazz harmonies together will introduce audiences to that type of music they’ve
probably never heard before, it’s close to barbershop but mustn’t be sweet like barbershop, it
must stay kind of sexy.
The nice thing about this kind of material is that most people are already familiar with it in a
film noir kind of way. We know who the detective is, who the girl with the golden heart is and
we recognise the archetypal cliché figures but that’s the joy in a way isn’t it? That you play
those roles to the hilt and don’t deviate from what’s given and that’s the pleasure. I always
worry about people who say ‘oh no I’m not playing that, it’s too cliché’
What about the staging? Are you going for noir-like visuals for the piece?
I want it to look like 1961; a little window of time where Kennedy has just come into the White
House, Frank Sinatra has just sung Come Fly With Me. 1958 to 63 is the window, the American
Dream came true, men’s suits became a little more narcissistic, hats became small brimmed, ties
became slim jim and we’re moving into the James Bond era of movies here and everything’s
kind of slicker. Like Mad Men on television, we want to nail that period, so it’s quite sharp and
sexy opposed to heavy and dowdy and noir.
Of course it has come from that detective background but it’s just become a little more bit slick.
The budget has give us some headaches in getting it exactly right but I hope for that five weeks
we’ll thrill the audiences that come to see it and prove it has got legs for a bigger audience later
on.
Are you excited about it?
Yep (laughs)
Are you nervous about it?
Yep (laughs)
Happy being on stage for it and performing in it?
Yes, I love performing. I love going on stage and smiling at an audience and have the audience
smile back at me, I love that.
Would you go back to performing in Rocky Horror again?
I don’t think I should. There’s no reason why I shouldn’t go back as The Narrator on a one-off
occasion. That would be alright, wouldn’t it? I did go over to Wimbledon at the end of
Wimbledon last year, we had a week there and I went and played the Usherette with a big
blonde wig on. I looked at bit like Joanna Slumley (laughs). I went on with an electric guitar and
played it live with the guitar, that was fun just topping and tailing the piece.
Let’s talk about your writing. Do you spend much time writing?
Yes I do. I’ve been doing the dramatisation of The Stripper, making sure that pulls together and
because our director has changed two locations. It’s not rocket science, it just needs top and
tailing, bringing us in and out of the new locations.
It really is an enjoyable process for me. I enjoy the cryptic crossword for the very same reasons
because it’s playing with words and structure and once again wit and intelligence is invested in
it. When writing a long-winded sentence full of prolix and bollocks, you look at it and reduce it
to something that’s sharp and witty and that gives you pleasure. Finding internal rhymes in the
songs is so enjoyable, getting that couplet together; it sends a little shiver of pleasure up your
back and you want to go out and stop people in the street and say ‘listen to this’.
What about inspiration? And what draws you to your subject material?
I find simplicity in art is very pleasurable. Less is more, you discover. When you’re young you
probably like things to be a little bit more baroque, messier and fussier and as you get older you
like things to be a little more streamlined and your wine a little drier. You like your vocalists to
be as pure as Billy Holiday and Chet Baker, less mannered, less show off.
What drew you to adapting The Stripper?
I like populist themes. I’m not a high brow, you see. I started my reading with comic books, Just
William, Enid Blyton at school and moved on to HG Wells and Saki, I love Saki and H. H.
Munro [they’re the same person], and all my reading is populist. I certainly loved the
paperbacks, I adored the rough and readiness of them. I love crime fiction even today and I
read an awful lot of crime. It’s possibly formulaic, it needs a beginning, a middle and an end
and it fits into something they call genre writing, however every now and again we get writers
that completely transcend the genre. James Lee Burton is probably one of the greatest American
men of letters of all time, never mind just genre writing. I think Dashiell Hammett is a great
writer and I think a lot of pulp fiction writers based their work on his. He was the daddy, even
Raymond Chandler is second to him. I mean Dashiell Hammett; his clarity, the spareness of his
lines and dialogue and description. It’s almost like reading a screenplay. It’s riveting and
wonderful. I like that.
You also have to remember of course, when I was a teenager and these people were writing
these books for people like me, who had left school at 16 and the percentage of the population
that went into higher education in those days was minimal, most people, I think we’re safe to
say, were undereducated; they didn’t want to read high brow, they wanted populist themes
that fitted their mentality and their educational mentality and these writers provided that for
them. They were happy to read it and take it, they had no aspirations to show off, they were just
ordinary folk like the rest of us and those are my people. That’s what I come from and I hope
that The Stripper will again provide entertainment for ordinary people that don’t necessarily
want to see The Ring Cycle. And wouldn’t thank you for a ticket to it in the first place, I don’t
blame them. I’ve been to an opera once, how boring it was. Wait for the aria, that’s cool but then
there’s days of telling the same things over again.
Does your work on stage always reflect your personal musical tastes?
Yes, I wouldn’t dream of working outside of my capabilities. I have no pretensions to high art. I
just hope what I do might become art and might be seen into be art, I wouldn’t call it high art. I
have no interest in being a high brow in fact it slightly gets up my nose from time to time when
I hear people banging on in a pontificating or pompous manner about things that are basically
just enjoyable. You don’t have to rationalise everything.
Are you still a keen sci-fi and horror fan?
Yeah I still enjoy it. I believe Moon is quite good, I’m looking forward to seeing that. I certainly
enjoyed Blade Runner and Alien, the first time they came out. I enjoy Star Trek and especially
like Voyager on television. Kate Mulgrew as Kathryn Janeway was a particularly fine actress
and I thought Patrick Stewart was excellent. Neither of them thought it beneath them to play
these roles and played it with enough dignity so it didn’t become trite. I hear the new film is
terribly good. Katherine and Patrick allowed growth to those story lines because they brought
fine acting and commitment to playing what could fall apart and become risible. I know a lot of
people belittle these series and laugh at Trekkies but they are examining the human condition in
each of these scenarios, there’s always something in it where a man is put under the
microscope. That’s always worth watching. There was a lot of depth. Some were better written
than others but I found them entertaining anyway.