Richard rocks

JUNE 16, 1973. Outside, thunder, lightning and torrential rain greeted the audience making their way to the tiny 62-seat theatre in London’s Sloane Square. Inside, the scandalous story of “two young ordinary healthy kids”, Brad and Janet, unfolded with a chap in fishnet tights orchestrating the raucous proceedings, aided by an assortment of, frankly, odd friends.

The Rocky Horror Show was born. Fast forward more than four decades to the Empire theatre, in Sunderland, where the show’s apparently ageless creator Richard O’Brien – check his attic for a Dorian Gray type portrait if you’re ever round his house – is talking about the Rocky road to success.

His gender-bending musical is still going strong today and so is O’Brien, although age has withered the desire and, indeed, ability to play his original role of Riff Raff, the sinister butler at Frank’n’Furter’s house of hammy Hammer horrors.

“I’m two years away from my three score years and ten – kicking your leg up eight shows a week... no, I don’t think so,” says a man who qualified as a dairy farmer in New Zealand, was a stunt rider in Carry On Cowboy and has seen Rocky Horror on stage and film become a cult favourite all over the world.

Some places remain for Frank’n’Furter and his gang to conquer. “Some of the Iron Curtain countries haven’t had it yet,” he says. “One wonders whether they’d get it. Obviously, it hasn’t been to China.”

Where, I wonder, hasn’t it worked? Amsterdam, he says. “It was a good show, but was completely unfunny. I think because Amsterdam is so liberal, the show had no bite. Rocky works terribly well in slightly more repressive civilisation places. In the southern states of America, even part of Australia, it becomes a little more risky and rebellious.”

The show that taught us how to do the Time Warp (with its pelvic thrust “that really drives you insa-a-ane”) is back in safe hands after a few years when those producing the tour let standards slip, he says. With the Ambassadors group now in charge, he’s happy to talk about the show once more.

“It’s a serious production company with serious production values – and that’s only right,” he says, during his trip to Sunderland Empire which, along with Darlington Civic Theatre, will welcome Rocky in coming months.

“When people are paying money to see a show, you have to make sure the sound is good, the actors are good and all those kind of things.

“If it gets too sloppy it’s going to stop having the magic and being enjoyable and, at the end of the day, stop making money for me.”

Then he adds, to avoid giving the wrong impression.

“Not that I’ve been driven by money, hand firmly on my heart.”

I’d suggest he could have retired on the proceeds, but he says: “I don’t think I could – and that’s been rather good for me.

“Rocky was never like a blockbuster and, consequently, it never really afforded me the big bucks which could have been my undoing.

I really believe that, certainly back in the early Seventies, if I had a lot of money coming in I might have fallen by the wayside because I’m weak and easily led, and shallow and foolish.”

What none of the Rocky team imagined on that stormy opening night was just how successful it would become. He thought everyone who wanted to see it would have done so by the end of the three-week run and he’d move on to something else.

Slowly, it dawned on him that Rocky was a success. “It was odd. It wasn’t like we went, ‘oops, we’ve got a hit’. I certainly wouldn’t have danced up and down because that’s not in my nature either.

“My nature is: is it working? Is it fun? Do I want to continue down this road? Because if it’s not fun what’s the point? And I’m not in it for the money or the fame, I’m in it for the fun.”

Times and audiences change. What was shocking in 1973 doesn’t cause anyone to bat an eyelid these days, although even O’Brien is capable of being shocked by the Rocky audience.

He recalls sitting in the coffee bar at a Plymouth theatre and watching the arriving audience as they climbed the stairs. “I could see these heads come up, two very elegant middle- aged ladies and two silver-haired gentlemen in tuxedo jackets. Moneyed, educated. As they came up the stairs, higher and higher, I thought what a very strange kind of audience coming to see our show.

“Then they appeared fully in view – the women were in elegant dresses and the men had fishnet stockings on.”

O’Brien has never achieved a theatrical success on the same scale, although he did go on to present Crystal Maze on TV, play the Childcatcher in the stage musical Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and, he points out, made an album that got five stars from Q magazine.

He’s aware that he can’t win. He’ll be damned if he sticks to the Rocky formula, and damned if he tries something new. “If anyone did call me a one-trick pony, I’d go, ‘well, it worked for Salinger, worked for Margaret Mitchell’.

“Why is one supposed to have achieved? I thought being born, living life, interacting with people, being loved and dying, that’s it, isn’t it? All the rest is fun.”

■ Rocky Horror Show: Darlington Civic Theatre, May 10-15, tickets 01325-486555 and online darlingtonarts.co.uk. Then Sunderland Empire, June 14-19, tickets 0844-8472499 and online sunderlandempire.org.uk