The Royal Court and The Rocky Company present

The Rocky Horror Tribute Show ( Archived )

By Richard O'Brien

3 May 2006

Jerwood Theatre Downstairs

The Royal Court Theatre and the Rocky Horror Company are proud to present a tribute performance of The Rocky Horror Show as part of the English Stage Company’s 50th Anniversary celebrations.

The Rocky Horror show opened at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs 33 years ago and, in a recent poll conducted by the Royal Court, was voted to be the most enjoyed piece of theatre that has been presented at the Royal Court Theatre over the past 50 years.

This will be a charity performance celebrating the Royal Court’s history with The Rocky Horror Show featuring original cast members and special guest performers.

Proceeds of the evening will be donated to Amnesty International and the Royal Court Theatre.

Our special guest performers will include Gary Amers, Michael Ball, Adrian Edmondson, Joanne Farrell, Stephen Gateley, Anthony Head, Little Nell, Richard O’Brien, Patricia Quinn, Ben Richards, Kraig Thornbur and Toyah Wilcox.

And special guest narrators will include Christopher Biggins, Rayner Bourton, Robin Cousin, Little Nell, Richard O’Brien, Steve Pemberton, Tony Slattery, and Jamie Theakston.

Reviews

Soldier’s tale that brings war home * * * *

Lyn Gardner, The Guardian, 25 April 2006

In Georg Buchner’s Woyzeck, a young illiterate soldier returns from war and is so alienated that his only way of expressing himself is through violence.

In the latest play from Simon Stephens, it is Danny – a squaddie who has served in Basra – who is bringing the war back home. To Danny it is not Iraq but England that is the foreign country. “I dont blame the war. The war was alright. I miss it. Its just you come back to this,” he says.

The ‘this’ is a girl who doesn’t love him, and who has got herself another boyfriend. It is an England where the “war on terror” has become a war waged using the tactics of the terrorists. It is also a place of dubious moralities, small-time arms dealers and middle class swingers and anti-war protesters.

Nobody is coming up smelling of roses, and this England has all the stinking attractions of a dog turd. Perhaps it is no surprise that Danny is going to turn his disappointment and inarticulate rage into an inarticulate revenge.

Anyone familiar with Stephen’s work may be in for a bit of a shock. In his excavations of working class life, Stephens has often displayed a tender touch. Motortown is like being run over by a 10-tonne truck that doesnt bother to stop to check that you are still breathing.

It is in no way a pleasant experience, but is, I think, an essential one. And it is not without a desperate, brutal tenderness, particularly in the relationship between the life-damaged Danny and his genetically damaged elder brother, Lee.

It is only with his brother that Danny gropes towards a kind of communication. There are imperfections: although the play is recklessly brave, its aim is sometimes that of the scatter gun, and in suggesting that Danny was a psychopath long before he went to Iraq, or perhaps even joined the army, Stephens undercuts the connection between personal violence and violence perpetrated in the name of the state.

But although it will probably get up a lot of liberal noses, this is a searingly honest play written and played particularly by Daniel Mays as Danny, with a deadly coiled energy. It owes a debt to Edward Bond as well as Bchner, and Ramin Gray’s stark production – played under bright lights, on a stripped-out stagea is thrustingly contemporary even as it pays homage to Brecht.

I could have done without the dancing furniture, but not the astonishing moments when blood is mopped from the stage in a ritual that feels both like absolution and a terrible punishment