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The Rocky Horror Picture Show

Kings Theatre

I was fortunate enough to see the stage show The Rocky Horror Show' in London's still more or less trendy King's Road, Chelsea, in 1975. The show got off to such a scary start that I forgot to eat my Mars Bar and clenched it so tightly in my fist that the wrapper and my fingers came to a sticky end.

Good live theatre always seems more funny, more tragic, more scary than cinema comedies, dramas and horrors, and the comparisons I make between The Rocky Horror Picture Show' and its stage predecessor are essentially those one makes between cinema and live theatre generally.

In the live 'Rocky Horror Show' the actor/singers coped admirably with those technical problems that can make or break a show. The set (an eerie castle) was full of flimsy scaffolding which was in full use all the time, demanding tremendous athletic feats from the uniformly high-heeled actors.

The microphone juggling that goes on in a modern, live musical was done precisely and discreetly, and fading from one scene to the next went smoothly.

Film removes all those difficulties, but so often a live show made into film, whether its a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta or 'Jesus Christ, Superstar', seems to lose a lot of its vitality. This applies to The Rocky Horror Picture Show' too.

Maybe the explanation lies in the fact that actors, who have time to 'warm up' in a live show, suffer from that lack of continuity which is involved in film-making. Then too, if the actors are unused to the film medium, the slight unease and restraint I sensed in The Rocky Horror Picture Show' is explained.

However, the actor/singers are still fairly lively, certainly well-cast, and individual performances in the film are good.

The 'Hero' and 'Heroine', Brad and Janet and the paraplegic Dr Everett Scott are cardboard-cutout characters, though ostensibly the action of the show is chiefly concerned with them. They are adequately portrayed and their story is told by the historian/narrator, who though a far cry from Kenneth Clark and Bronowski, successfully combines something of their manner with a comic-strip style narration.

But the stars of the show are Frank (played by Tim Curry) (the transvestite creator of a blond, beautiful, apparently bisexual and utterly stupid 'monster', Rocky Horror), and his grisly retinue of household retainers: Columbia (a groupie), Magentia (a domestic), and Riff Raff, the hunchbacked butler.

Riff Raff is played by actor Richard O'Brien who seems to thrive on 'nasty' roles and whose leering, mean, vicious performance here is deliciously spine-chilling.

All the cliches of (as the opening song has it) 'a late night double-feature picture show' are here - the crazy characters, a mad 'scientist's' laboratory, the innocent hero and heroine, closed circuit TV systems and Charles Atlas(l) as well as things that go bump and grind in the night (sic).

Over all it is a camp mythology of black net stockings and lurex and lipstick which revamps the Frankenstein Genre and leaves it for dead.

The last words in bad taste, manifested in a Michelangelesque swimming pool and an electric meat-carving gadget, only enhance the delicate balance of the sublime, and the ridiculous.

By the way, the 'shorts' included a film about Rhodesia, made with a rose-tinted lens in about the early 1960s - the most outrageous and consciousness-rousing thing I've seen in a long while - don't miss it.

Marie Russell