A Rude Awakening
Friday 3rd April, 3.32pm
The week after the rather risqué Spring Awakening opened in the West End, we take a look at the history of some of the capital’s saucy big-name shows.
The sublimely fruity Spring Awakening got one of our reviewers a little hot under the collar earlier in the week: check out review if you don’t believe me. Of course, being a bit sexy is nothing new… in fact, one could say that dipping a script into the perfumed pool of down-right salaciousness has, in the past, made for some of the West End’s most memorable productions.
Take, for example, the almost Biblical hoo-hah over the musical Hair. When that transferred from Broadway in 1968, The Shaftesbury Theatre had to wait for Draconian censorship laws to be abolished before they could open. Billed as “The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical”, Hair was a colourful anti-Vietnam show that centred on a tribe of long-haired hippies. The show was notorious both then and now for several reasons: the foremost being its supposedly subversive and un-American stance… Oh, and I forgot to mention, Hair also had a teeny-tiny naked scene at the end of the first act. Well, butter my scones if the critics didn’t go completely snooker-loopy mental over that. Labelled “vulgar” and “ugly”, Variety magazine even went so far as to describe it as being “without a story, form, music, dancing, beauty or artistry”.
Strewth. Still, it could be worse; in Norway, local citizens were so outraged by the decision to stage the production that they formed a human barricade to try to prevent the performance. Less “let the sunshine in”, more “keep the hippies out”.
Effectively ending theatrical censorship in Britain, the premiere of Hair in the West End was the culmination of a high-profile movement to liberate what could and could not be shown on stage. Led by luminaries such as the divinely foppish critic Kenneth Tynan, the abolition of the censorship laws in Britain made it possible for all manner of rudery to flood the hallowed stages of the West End.
But, of course, it didn’t. There wasn’t a sudden deluge of filth; it just allowed people to criticise the Queen and blaspheme and the like. Still, it’s not like Shakespeare and Marlowe weren’t remarkably bawdy; it’s just that, I suppose, a lot of people were willing to overlook Lear’s grimier moments on account of it being the Bard and therefore a cornerstone of our culture… either that or they didn’t understand what he was banging on about when he starts raving about centaurs (Act Four, Scene Six – look it up: wow and blimey.)
Since then there’s been quite a few saucy shows to hit the West End. At one end of the scale there are musicals like Dirty Dancing and Grease which are only moderately racy on the sauce-o-meter – well, I say that, the original stage version of Grease is no picnic, there’s a fair bit of risqué language in that I can tell you.
No, they’re still pretty tame compared to some. Notably, there was that time when Harry Potter bared all in Equus. In Daniel Radcliffe’s brave stint as animal-lover Alan Strang, he had to appear completely naked. Ka-zaam.
Naturally, far more outrageous plays than Equus have been produced in London’s West End. Sarah Kane’s Blasted is so completely scandalous that I’m not sure how much of the plot I can even represent here… yep, basically none of it. If you think that’s bad, I can’t even say the name of Mark Ravenhill’s first full-length play to be staged at The Royal Court: it really is that rude.
So, to conclude, it seems that a little dash of crudity never hurt anyone’s box-office figures. Though Spring Awakening may be causing a ripple of excitement, and one or two giggles of embarrassment, in the West End at the moment, compared to some of the hits of the past, it reads like an episode of Last of the Summer Wine.
That said, I can’t remember Nora Batty ever asking anyone to give her a good whipping.
