An audience with the queen: Rocky Horror’s Richard O’Brien on the monster behind his new show

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It’s been 50 years since The Rocky Horror Show became a global phenomenon. Now, creator Richard O’Brien is heading back out on the road and he says the world has a lot more to worry about than some sex-crazed, cross-dressing aliens.

The front door opens with an ominous creak. A
slender hand drums long, pale fingers on the wooden frame. “You’re wet,” says Richard O’Brien, regarding me archly with a mixture of amusement and disdain. “I think you’d better come inside.”

None of this is actually true. When I arrive at O’Brien’s country estate, south of Katikati, the sun is sparkling on the estuary and there’s not a rain cloud in sight. The “estate” part isn’t strictly true, either. The gothic revival-style barn he designed 25 years ago on the back of a paper napkin sits on a flat one-hectare paddock, but there is a gatehouse and stables.
The legendary Rocky Horror Show creator settled back in New Zealand permanently a decade or so ago but it’s his Bavarian wife, Sabrina Graf, who waves me in from the front porch. “Please drive slowly because it’s a cat and bunny playground,” she’d texted me earlier. O’Brien doesn’t have a mobile phone.
Any Rocky Horror aficionado – and some 30 million people around the world have seen the stage show – will know the famous scene in which Brad and Janet (Barry Bostwick and Susan Sarandon in the movie version) turn up at the castle door one dark and stormy night.
Sarandon, who spent much of the freezing shoot in wet underwear, came down with pneumonia. Mick Jagger was once in the running to play the transvestite alien, mad-scientist role that ignited Tim Curry’s career, and apparently the Transylvanians were high for the entire six weeks.
O’Brien, who’s now 82, remains one of Hamilton’s most famous exports. When a lifesize bronze statue of him as the Rocky Horror character Riff Raff in spacesuit and suspenders was unveiled on the spot where he worked as a barber in the early 60s, a hidden camera was installed to film fans doing the Time Warp next to it.
What I’ve come to talk with him about, though, is an entirely new stage production he’s created and is about to take on a nationwide tour. A satirical fairy tale set to live music, The Kingdom of Bling stars O’Brien as The Narrator, alongside an ensemble cast featuring Rima Te Wiata as The Mother and Paul Barrett as an evil, Donald Trump-inspired monster ominously called The He.
The family-friendly show follows two children into a shared dream as they set off on a quest to find their missing father, encountering a menacing fox, trolls and giants made out of stone along the way. O’Brien’s 6-year-old granddaughter came to see a trial run in Tauranga last year.
All the royalties from what’s being called “The Kindness Tour” will go to the Auckland Starship Children’s Hospital in perpetuity. However, like all fairy tales, a darker underworld is at play.
The story was written out of despair at the ugliness of far-right politics and O’Brien’s horror that “this orange pustule of a human being, this disgrace to humanity” might make it back into the White House.
“Mr Fox, well, we know who he is,” he says, referring to Rupert Murdoch’s powerful, right-wing media empire Fox News. “I don’t know how they got away with it, deliberately helping Trump divide the nation, turning nice people against one another and keeping this current of fear running through everything. It’s disgusting, isn’t it?”
The first thing he does every morning is scour media feeds for the latest Trump news. The state of the world distresses him so intensely that it worries Graf, who sees how deeply it affects him, but O’Brien believes the threat to liberal democracy needs to be taken seriously.
“If all you’re going for is greed and a celebration of wealth and isn’t it great that I’ve got so far and f*** you, it’s not good enough,” he says. “You’d think character would count for something. But that’s where we are at the present. It’s a very scary time.”
So, that’s the first 40 minutes or so of his show. The second half will be an open-floor Q&A session with the audience. There’s a lot of ground to cover and O’Brien, a theatrical storyteller who’s both gracious and charming, has said nothing will be off the table.
Next year, it’ll be five decades since the Rocky Horror Picture Show flopped on release in the UK before becoming a celluloid cult classic. His son Linus, who lives in Los Angeles, is working on a documentary to mark the anniversary. The original stage show, unleashed at the height of the 70s glam rock era, has been in continuous production somewhere in the world ever since.
Last month, O’Brien was back in London for the launch of a new UK tour, with one-time Neighbours heart-throb Jason Donovan as Frank-N-Furter. (Donovan, I suggest, is no Tim Curry. “Well, nobody is. Tim set the bar very high.”)
On opening night, O’Brien was brought up on stage to thundering applause and 2000 people joined him in singing one of the show’s iconic numbers, There’s a Light (Over at the Frankenstein Place). “It was terribly nice.”
On the day I visit, O’Brien is dressed in black leggings, black knee-high fashion boots and a striped knit sweater, setting off what a recent Guardian article described as his toothpick body and lightbulb head.
A father of three, he’s been married three times and has always embraced the feminine yin alongside his masculine yang. In the past, he’s described himself as a third gender but shrugs that off now. “No, I consider myself to be me.”
The house, a slender open-plan design with a steeply pitched roof, is filled with the kind of eclectic ephemera you might imagine. On one wall, banknotes from around the world have been formed into an artwork with “The Root of All Evil” written over it in black capital letters.
It had felt impolite to turn up empty-handed, so I’ve come armed with morning tea. “Oh my gosh, that’s a lamington, is it?” he exclaims. “No! I haven’t seen one since I was a child.
“We used to call them limingtons. I didn’t know they were lamingtons until I got to England. We play fast and easy with the vowels, don’t we? Help yourself, darling. You can use your fingers, dear girl. Get stuck in.”
Born in England, O’Brien arrived in New Zealand with his family at the age of 10 and spent what he considers his formative youth here. After leaving school at 15, he worked in a barbershop at the front of Hamilton’s old Embassy Theatre for five years, frequenting the late-night screenings that would later inspire the concept of Rocky Horror and its signature song.
Leaning heavily into that science fiction, B-movie vibe, he wrote the music, lyrics and script for the original theatre show while in London as an out-of-work actor and later co-wrote the film’s screenplay, playing the straggle-haired hunchback Riff Raff in both versions.
The transgressive sexual themes of Rocky might not be nearly so shocking these days, with the rainbow community no longer driven underground, but provincial New Zealand seems the most unlikely place to stumble across someone so exuberantly and unabashedly queer. Yet, despite his decades away, this has always been home for O’Brien.
“I might get weepy from time to time, darling. Forgive me,” he says, dabbing at his eyes when we talk about one of his old English teachers at Tauranga Boys’ College. A Gallipoli veteran, his gentle kindness was O’Brien’s light in the darkness when the school tried in vain to cane the “poof” out of him.
I ask if a sense of difference has always set him apart. “I’ll tell you when the shutters came down … I was 6½ and I remember telling my big brother that I wanted to be the fairy princess when I grew up.
“I saw the look on his face and I knew at that moment to never say that again. And now I’m a full-blown queen. Not bad, is it?”
He and Graf, who’s three decades younger, met in London when O’Brien was playing the Child Catcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. In 2012, she flew out to New Zealand, arriving in time for his final performance as Fagin in a three-week run of Oliver! at the Founders Theatre in Hamilton. He proposed during the interval and they married at their Katikati home the following year.
“She has saved my life, there’s no doubt,” he tells me. “I wouldn’t be talking to you now; I would have drunk myself to death probably. And you know, she’s put up with me and I’m not easy. I’ve got a childish temper.”
These days, it seems, O’Brien’s eccentricities are viewed with affection. I ask if he’s treated like a local celebrity and he laughs. “You know, I’m Katikati’s Jessica Fletcher,” he says, referring to the mystery writer played by Angela Lansbury in the 80s TV show Murder, She Wrote. “It’s like Cabot Cove.
“And I’m allowed to be myself again. I’m getting older and uglier, and a frock doesn’t suit me as much, but when I was younger and not so ragged looking, I could put one on and go out for lunch and nobody minded.
“Clothes are just clothes as far as I’m concerned. I used to get black tie invitations and, in the corner, there’d be a note saying, ‘Not you, Richard.’ I put on a frock, just like the Pope puts on a frock. If he can do it, I can do it.”
The Rocky Horror stage show is now run by a professional company that ensures a high level of quality control, after some missteps with management in the past. O’Brien is on the board and remains actively engaged, although he was “marginalised” by the film deal and has seen relatively little revenue from that.
The day after we meet, there’s a studio session scheduled for his long-running role in Phineas and Ferb, the US animated musical-comedy series in which he voices the scatterbrained dad. He’s also written a series of illustrated “cautionary tales” he’d like to see published. There’s one about the Kardashians called An Ode to a Fatuous Fowl.
As with The Kingdom of Bling, any revenue generated by his stories will be gifted to Starship. In the UK, O’Brien presented a popular 90s game show, The Crystal Maze, and raised thousands of pounds for the Royal Manchester Children’s Hospital after getting letters from children in the cancer ward who thought his bald head looked cool. Talking about that makes him emotional, too.
On his recent trip back to London, he had breakfast with Stephen Fry and bumped into Sir Ian McKellen. Such are the circles he moves in when abroad, although “a light has gone out somewhere” in England and he’s glad to be home.
Still shaking off the after-effects of jet lag, he’d woken from a feverish dream the previous night in which he found himself at some sort of religious school that turned out to be something else altogether.
“It was quite satanic!” he says, his eyes glinting with mischief and delight. “And I thought, my goodness, there’s a story here somewhere …”
Joanna Wane is an award-winning feature writer on the NZ Herald’s Lifestyle Premium team, with a special focus on social issues and the arts.
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