Ready to do the Time Warp again

Sep 2 2009 by Will Harris, Crewe Chronicle

IT MAY have been 36 years since The Rocky Horror Show first wowed audiences, but creator Richard O’Brien insists the magic hasn’t died.

The 67-year-old still delights in the impact the show has on theatres around the world, and the cult following it has gained through four decades.

A fresh touring production comes to the Regent Theatre in Hanley later this month, starring Olivier Award-winning David Bedella as the sexually liberated deviant Frank N Furter.

O’Brien, who later became a household name as presenter of Channel 4 game show The Crystal Maze, says he never tires of talking about his greatest creation.

“Rocky Horror is one of those great joys in my life because it’s a great joy in other people’s lives, he says.

“One of the nicest things about being in this business is I love the fact the show comes into town and it cheers people up.

“This time round with Rocky I haven’t had to be too hands on, simply because there are two people involved this time I know I can trust completely. One is director Christopher Luscombe, and the other is David Bedella.

“With the two of them at the helm I didn’t really have to worry very much. I would really hate to think that an audience was being short-changed.”

The Rocky Horror Show tells the story of engaged sweethearts Brad and Janet who are forced to seek refuge in a castle full of the maddest, baddest and sexiest group the world has ever seen.

Aside from the risque content, one of the production’s most endearing qualities is for audience members to take the plunge and cross-dress.

O’Brien says: “One always has to bear in mind 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 might seem a bizarre concept, and equally surprising that it enjoyed such success for an acclaimed film starring Tim Curry, Susan Sarandon and Meatloaf to be made in 1975.

Of the film, O’Brien says: “It was a quick shoot, just six weeks. 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.”

But the idea started with O’Brien’s love of late-night B movies in the late 1960s.

He said: “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 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.

“And then it started doing that late-night business itself, played for 25 or 30 years, and became one of the most successful movies in 20th Century Fox’s history.”

The Rocky Horror Show runs at The Regent Theatre from Monday, September 28 until Saturday, October 3. Tickets are £13.50-£29.50 – to book, phone 0844 871 7649.