It is brave to take on a production of the cult hit, The Rocky Horror Show. It is also plainly foolish if you do not have deep pockets. Audiences are used to the film and to international stage versions — all with high production values. You are also up against a history of stellar performances, including some tip-top South African productions. This creates fair expectations since the producers are, after all, trading on these past successes to entice the audience.
Spier’s pockets are not deep enough, it seems, for a cast of 40 and royalties in British pounds. A million rand later and we are still left with a bottom-budget production: the costumes are ill-fitting and look cheap, the lights flash with all the technical splendour of a school disco and the wooden stage — one cannot call it a set — has the company half the time standing behind it at their microphones. The lead players are not miked, but fumble with cumbersome hand-helds while trying to act or in one famous scene copulate.
None of the above is in the least important if you are going to give your audience a fresh reading of the work. In the absence of orgasmic sets, pyrotechnics, motorbikes on stage and everything that helps make this great musical, you need what money can’t buy — creativity and ingenuity.
The director got it right only once in a delightful scene when the cast improvised a motor car. More of this and the evening might have held up. Unfortunately, the direction was unforgivably banal. There was almost a complete absence of design. Missing all its original creator’s Gothic, horror and science-fiction inter-textual references, there were no innovations to re-contextualise the work other than to throw in a few well-received Afrikaans lines. Even the bank of television monitors at the back of the stage were hopelessly underused.
The production hangs on the central gender-bending figure of Dr Frank ‘n’ Furter, a transvestite from another planet. Kurt Haupt is a great singer, but simply can’t act. Lacking any masculine edge, the result was to sanitise the transgressive nature of the role — critical if the performance is to have a vital edge. The sidekicks, Riffraff and Magenta, played by Andries Mbali and Bulelwa Cosa, deserve mention for keeping it together.
Audience members dressed up for the occasion and many got into the swing of things. The band could have helped, but were marginalised by the staging. Only the saxophone rose to the occasion.
The Dimpho Di Kopane troupe is a theatre company made up of emergent and great talents. They are gorgeous, have strong vocals, an excellent chorus and are brimful with enthusiasm. Although the dialogue throughout was affected and stilted, the soloists uneven, the interpretation and treatment of the songs too straight, we eagerly wanted to applaud and cheer the zealous cast and leave our critical baggage at home. However, with such unimaginative direction and poor casting, we were presented with what resembled an end-of-term concert.