BWW Interviews: Richard O'Brien Discusses THE ROCKY HORROR SHOW and More in an Exclusive Interview

Interviewed by Christine Pyman, Wednesday 26th March 2014

Yesterday I was lucky enough to be granted an exclusive interview with the very charming Richard O'Brien, best known as the creator of The Rocky Horror Show and currently appearing as The Narrator in the Adelaide production. Sabrina Graf, his friendly and lovely wife accompanied him.

After chatting a little, we got down to business.

CP: For the 40th anniversary of Rocky Horror, why did you decide to play the narrator here in Adelaide?

RO'B: Because I was asked to. John Frost and Sir Howard Panter, the British producer, a friend and colleague of mine, went up to see the opening of the show in Brisbane, which we loved, and when we went back to New Zealand they said " would you be interested in coming to Adelaide, come to play the Narrator?" I'd never been to Adelaide, and I'd heard so much about the architecture here that I'd always wanted to come and see this city for myself. Much of it is my idea of heaven, especially the Gothic Revival, the late Victorian Gothic Revival, is one of my favourite areas of art and architecture. So that's really why we came here, and it is delightful. It's a shame that the city fathers don't clean up King Bill Street and Hindley Street, it's a depressing kind of introduction to a lovely city for most tourists, and it is our first stop off when you think the Intercontinental and the Stamford Hotels are here, and the railway station - beautiful railway station, absolutely stunningly beautiful railway station. So for a couple of days we were deeply disappointed, the unpleasantness of King William Street and Hindley Street, the dirt and the filth, and the lack of interest, but over the last few days, the architecture has taken over and we discovered Rundle Street and Hutt Street, and various pretty little areas of the town. I think somebody should get onto the city fathers and have a word with them about this, it's the tourists first impression, and the drunks at night in that area are not good, it's intimidating and frightening, and somebody should do something about that, I think, because it is a city with so much potential, and so much more to offer than, say, Sydney. Sydney is bright and brash but it hasn't got this history that this town's got. Somebody needs to do something about it, because it's our first collision with the city, and it's just unpleasant. It gives people the wrong impression, it's like coming to London and taking people to, I don't know, a housing estate, or going to New York and the first impression you get are the Projects, do you know what I mean? I mean it just doesn't work.

CP: You have a fascinating history in predominately cult scene theatre, stage, film, production, it's been a true artists journey, what's been your most enjoyable experience out of all these areas?

RO'B: Writing lyrics gives me the greatest pleasure. I like the craft of it. I like the fact that you have walls and parameters and structure. As a lyricist, you have no idea how wonderful it is to get a couplet that you know that nobody else has ever, ever come up with before. Can you imagine every lyricist trying to rhyme the word "love", and you go- everybody's been there, you know, "above", "glove" "dove", "of" occasionally, so every time you come up against that, and one does, you feel kind of contained and a bit cheesed off and you haven't done anything original. And then one day, you see, I just discovered those Slavic names like Rachmaninov, and went- nobody's done that before, nobody's done that before, yum, and he's not the only one with a Slavic name, there's more waiting, but the joy! I was talking to another lyricist once and I said there's times you know when you write a little couplet or three or four lines and you want to rush out and stop people in the street. Once I was writing " the quick of us, pick Icarus, to be a stinker of a pilot, but anyone that near the sun ain't no shrinking violet" and you go YES! YES!

CP: That is lovely, truly lovely.

RO'B: I know!

CP: When you had finished writing Rocky Horror, did you realise you had actually touched a pulse, like a darker pulse within, of so many people in society and their lives, or did that come later?

RO'B: I guess we've always been aware that there's a narcissistic, exhibitionist streak in all of us, that thankfully most of us are too well mannered, too shy perhaps, too scared, thankfully, otherwise the street would be a mess wouldn't it? Off the leash, the feral kind of drunks are bad enough at the moment, imagine if they were clattering around in a state of engorged ecstasy, it wouldn't do, would it?

CP: You've said in one of your interviews that being successful has given you freedom, all sorts of freedom, do you think that freedom is necessary to allow for fruition of genius, and do you think that if more people were themselves that more works of genius would be created?

RO'B: I think everybody should be free to be themselves, however society isn't that kind. If we're talking about my gender kind of confusion, I'm very lucky in the fact that I'm in show business, so therefore I'm given a certain leniency, over, say, if I was a headmaster of a school, or something like that. I'm the tip of the iceberg, in many ways, I'm a visible kind of transgender person, I don't want to say transvestite, transsexual, trans something or other, I see it on the continuum of male and female, I'm somewhere in there, and I'm allowed, or I've allowed myself. If I was a politician or something like that, I would be not allowed to be open. Repression is a dreadful thing, it is a madness. I mean, once upon a time the gay men couldn't find jobs as teachers, the erroneous thinking was, you know, that we couldn't have a man like that teaching our boys, as if you were a gay man you were also a paedophile, and we know that's not true. If you were going to follow that train of thought through well in that case, we can't do that, we can't have a heterosexual man teaching our girls, can we? If that's the same approach, its not, so all those sorts of things go on, but certainly a man in a dress is going to come up against certain problems. What people don't understand is that it's not that long ago women were not allowed to wear jeans. My sister, I remember conversations in our household where "should she" or "shouldn't she" be allowed to wear a pair of jeans, and I suppose it's a long time ago for most people, but it's within my lifetime, and I'd say when she was a teenager, probably about thirteen or fourteen, and I'd have been coming up eight or nine, but I remember the conversation well, and people forget that, that Katherine Hepburn and... " I want to be alone"... whatever her name was, these women broke the mould. And women wearing trousers was deemed to be not quite 'um hum', all there. It was tricky, but now we just accept the fact that women can wear trousers, pants, if they want to, and quite rightly so. Some men do look silly in a frock, there's no doubt about that, what they try to do is be a girl, and that's a different thing. I don't try to be a girl I just try to be me. Sometimes I put a wig on, but I might take it off halfway through sitting at the table, it's a bit of fun, you know, like a hat.

CP: Going back to Rocky Horror, there is a mythic quality to it, and a lot of the other shows that you have been involved with, they're very faery tale, almost the 'Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came' type of thing. Is that an archetype that resonates with you?

RO'B: I love faery tales; I love narrative poetry, faery tales, songs with stories. I love performing for children, because I'm.. there's that wonderful thing of the lights coming down, the audience sitting there, and the lights coming down, and it's something.. the curtain goes out, magical moment, taking a child, creating a magical moment that a child can get lost in, that this child can get lost in, me, and I adore it. I can't think of anything nicer. I'm not in the business of appealing to the intellect; I'm not in the business of gaining a reputation for the classics or anything else. I'm in the business of dressing up and making believe and enjoying them, so much that you forget where you are, and there's only that reality, of going on stage, and that's the only reality and I do get lost in it, so maybe that was part of my escapism from living in my head, because that's where I did live for most of my life, I really wasn't all there. Because I am so scared that people would discover 'my secret', and I would be ridiculed, and so I lived in my head. Consequently I didn't really engage fully with other people, I was, I was getting around like a fully functioning alcoholic, I suppose, in the same kind of way, do you know what I mean, you're there, you're doing everything, but truthfully you're not actually all there. Thankfully I've got over that now.

CP: Do you think that actually, living in the space in your head is what's led you to create your own worlds?

RO'B: Probably what it was, yeah. Luckily it made me, made me a voyeur of life, in a way, and that's not necessarily a bad thing, is it? You know, everybody else is busy being while you're at one side, watching and taking it all in. I was very gauche and very naïve like most New Zealanders and Australians of my generation, we were severely undereducated, we left school at fifteen, severely unsophisticated, our jokes and laughter was ribald and blokey and unfunny, we were gauche. I got to England and remained this gauche person, my success in some ways- I wasn't a terribly handsome human being, but I wasn't unpleasant to look at, and that's always a good card. Regardless of what anybody says, looks do count. Because I was naïve I kept me mouth shut, I was polite, and therefore I was very welcome to sit at tables where British people couldn't sit because they were, in their own way, intimidated by the class system, they were fucked by the class system, and working class boys, if they were introduced to somebody that was aristocratic, didn't know how to handle it. I was from New Zealand, I didn't need to, all I needed was this a nice person or wasn't this a nice person, I didn't see the class. New Zealand was a classless society when I lived there when I was bought up. A meritocracy, an egalitarian meritocracy, and I f-ing loved that. It's going now with John Key trying, bringing back the knighthoods and all that shit, 'cause he wants one himself, and he's tarred with the same brush as you've got, you've got Tony Abbott. They're very similar kind of people, they're locked into the 'global economy' and they think that, that's all they can think about. And it's annoying. So, I was very lucky, because I went to England with that card in my hand, this classless society card, and because, as I say, I wasn't unpleasant to look at, and was polite, and clean and tidy, and listened, I was always welcome, and I could sit down with kings and clowns and it didn't matter, that was my luck, and consequently I was off the banana boat from New Zealand and a year later I'm in Mick Jagger's front room, you know, and having lunch with Peter O'Toole, and I was a little boy with no skills, no intellect, nothing to discuss about the classics. No depth, but obviously something here that they recognised, and I would be. In 1969 I did a play at the Mermaid Theatre called 'Gullivers Travels' - Dean Swift, and Sean Kenny was the director, Sean Kenny was the first set designer for 'Oliver', and here I am, I'm just a member of a company of thirty people, but Sean gets me by the arm, and puts me into the back of the car and starts taking me out for dinner and, there's nothing sexual about this at all, and I kept thinking, I wonder why, I wonder why, 'cause I had nothing to offer conversationally or anything, and I wasn't that good looking, know what I mean, and I could never understand, but I must have had something or done something or, I don't know what it was, 'cause I wasn't all there. I believe that I had a sympathetic approach to people and that might well have been it, and of course a lot of other actors and players wanted to be successful, they wanted to have dinner with whoever, and you see, but I didn't give a shit, it didn't worry me. If he'd just waved at me and went 'bye' I'd just do the same thing. I don't know what it was that I had, that secret ingredient that made me able to be invited into these places, I have no idea what that was, but I didn't push it. Odd, isn't it?

CP: Can you give us an insight into what would be your ideal for a 50th anniversary celebration of Rocky Horror? Have you thought that far ahead?

RO'B: It's gold isn't it? I'd like people to give me lots of gold. [laughing] I don't know, I've got no idea. I played Fagin recently, I've always wanted to play Fagin 'cause Lionel was a very very dear friend of mine, and I always wanted to play it and Cameron wouldn't let me play it, and I'd seen Oliver many many times, and the best Fagin was Robert Lindsay, as far as I'm concerned, I've seen many people do it, but Bobby Lindsay had a, something with the kids that shifted, you know, you knew that he liked the kids, no matter how kind of like he used them and you know, got all the money off them, and I thought to myself, I've seen Bobby do this, and I've seen the others do it, and I want to do it better than Bobby. Sing it better than anybodies sung it. Mostly actors playing that role, actors sing, speak, sprachen, and I wanted to get, win it, sing " what happens to me when I'm seventy" and I was waiting for someone in the audience to go " too f-ing late, mate". [laughs]

CP: Is there anything you haven't tackled yet that you'd like to?

RO'B: Well that was one, that was on my bucket list, playing Fagin, that was definitely one of mine. I'd like to sing, do an evening of jazz standards with a really big swing band, Nelson Riddle's Orchestra would have been perfect. I'd love to do that. I'd like to ride, I would have liked to have ridden in an amateur flat race, too old now, but I would have adored to have ridden in an amateur flat race. I'm very good on a horse. Horses like me, there's something else you see, something that really can't be learned or taught. I can go into a paddock and just stand quietly in the paddock and the horses will finally come around, I mean I don't have to chase them, there's a feeling of, I don't know what it is, it's there and I love it. And as you know, being on a horse the first time you ever get past that posting trot and you get into your canter the first time, Oh, what a joy that is, what a joy, you can't believe it's happening. It's fantastic, it's like your first org*sm almost, and you go ahhh, wow, nobody told us about this.

CP: Maybe because you do tap into the faery tale, story energy, that's natural energy of the world, horses, animals, children recognise that.

RO'B: I don't know. I was doing a film many years ago in Prague, when the Russians were still there, when the Iron Curtin was still up before the wall came down, and we'd been away, a two week break and went back to finish up some stuff and found ourselves in a little village far away from Prague, and do still remember that the Russians are still there so the social atmosphere in the street is different, and it really is strange because there's a feeling of not quite free, and people looking at you with suspicion and maybe envy that you're living in the West, and all that kind of stuff, you know the repressive nature of the regime was everywhere, and we were using a great big house, Kaiser geld house, and we were sitting somewhere. Our producer had been talking to one of the men that had been around with the production. He was Jewish, and being confined to living in this country, under this repressive totalitarian Russian government, and I'm just sitting at the end of the table and he's saying " for me, it's very difficult when you people come, Richard, of course, is very simpatico" and I remember him saying it and pointing at me as simpatico. I thought, how do you divine that? We haven't hardly said anything to each other, I'm just the same, part of a group of people. But apparently I was. Maybe it was because I interacted with some of the children on the set and what not. I didn't stop to think about things where other people were more reserved, maybe English people are reserved and that's seen as indifference or aloofness or whatever. I don't know. I can't be aloof, that won't work. So I don't know, once again, maybe that's what's got me through life without me knowing it. I don't know, but I'm grateful for whatever it is.

This beautiful creature coming into my life, [gesturing to Sabrina] I tried to push her away, I've known her for twelve years but tried to push her away, 'I'm too old, you're too young'. Now here we are and her coming into my life makes me want to cry with joy. It's fantastic. I don't deserve anything, really, and I really do appreciate everything. Most grateful for everything that I have, I don't take any of it for granted. My children love me, isn't that great? My siblings would stand up and take a bullet for me, so I'm very, very lucky. And I'm allowed to be me. Don't think I take this for granted.

P: Thank you so much for all of those wonderful answers.

RO'B: A pleasure. A pleasure.

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