Rocky Horror Show cast get ready to Time Warp in Belfast
The popular show has built up a huge cult following over the years as fans follow the adventures of Brad Majors and Janet Weiss who accidentally find themselves in Frank-N-Furter's country mansion living alongside the perfect man Rocky and domestics Riff Raff and Magenta. The iconic Time Warp dance is also a hugely popular feature of the show. Patricia Quinn played Magenta and the Usherette in the Royal Court production and subsequent film. Natasha Hoeberigs is now playing Magenta and the Usherette and is proud to be part of a show with such an important legacy. "Incredible people have come and gone through the show over the years, like the amazing Patricia Quinn," she said."To step into the shoes of a role that she originated, it's a blessing, it's a dream come true," she said. "I grew up as a child in New Zealand watching the film and watching her portrayal and thinking that's amazing,".
In Hamilton in New Zealand there is a statue of Riff Raff. Rocky fans have tried to get a Magenta statue organised in Belfast. Ms Hoeberigs believes it "has to happen". "I think we need to start a petition and I think everyone who is a fan of Rocky Horror needs to get on board with this and we must pay homage to Patricia Quinn and her Magenta," she said. "Richard O'Brien has his statue in Hamilton in New Zealand and it would be so special to have one here in Belfast."
Connor Carson used to perform in amateur shows in Belfast and Lisburn before training professionally. He has now performed in the West End and Rocky Horror is his first UK tour."The first professional show I ever watched as a little kid was here in the Grand Opera House so it's definitely a full circle moment to come back here and be playing one of the leads in Rocky Horror - it's a pinch me moment," he said.Connor says it is very comforting to hear Northern Irish accents in the crowd and meeting him at stage door. "It's such an iconic show and people love it so much so it's great to bring that to Belfast as well," he said. "There is pressure here as I've a bunch of family and friends coming to see it this weekend. "It's amazing to be part of something that means so much to people and that they can connect with. It's really special."One of Connor's favourite bits of the show is getting to perform the Time Warp, particularly during the finale. "Doing the Time warp is an iconic piece of choreography, everyone has been doing at primary school discos since they were five years old," he added.
The Rocky Horror show is currently playing at the Grand Opera House in Belfast before moving on to Dublin and then the Millennium Forum in Londonderry.
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The Guardian
4 days ago
- The Guardian
‘It was a buddy movie – and then they kissed': Stephen Frears and Hanif Kureishi on My Beautiful Laundrette at 40
It is a sweltering summer afternoon and I'm blowing bubbles over the heads of Stephen Frears and Hanif Kureishi while they have their pictures taken in a sun-dappled corner of the latter's garden. Perched in front of them as they sit side by side – Kureishi, who has been tetraplegic since breaking his neck in a fall in 2022, is in a wheelchair – is a silver cake made to look like a washing machine, commissioned to mark the 40th anniversary of their witty, raunchy comedy-drama My Beautiful Laundrette. Some of the bubbles land on the cake's surface, causing everyone present to make a mental note to skip the icing, while others burst on the brim of Frears's hat or drift into Kureishi's eyes. It is not perhaps the most dignified look for an esteemed duo celebrating an enduring Oscar-nominated gem. Don't think they haven't noticed, either. As the bubbles pop around them, Kureishi upbraids the photographer for trampling on his garden – 'Mind my flowers!' – while Frears grumbles: 'I could be watching the cricket.' Get them on to the subject of the film, though, and an aura of pride soon prevails. No wonder. My Beautiful Laundrette, which revolves around a run-down dive transformed into 'a jewel in the jacksie of south London' by an Anglo-Pakistani entrepreneur and his lover, did many things: it distilled and critiqued an entire political movement (Thatcherism), portrayed gay desire in unfashionably relaxed terms, and audaciously blended social realism with fable-like magic and cinematic grandeur. It launched a writer (Kureishi), a production company (Working Title, later the home of Richard Curtis), a prestigious composer (Hans Zimmer) and, most strikingly, one of the greatest of all actors: Daniel Day-Lewis, who plays Johnny, the ex-National Front thug teaming up (and copping off) with his former schoolmate Omar (Gordon Warnecke). Or 'Omo' as Johnny teasingly calls him even as he licks his neck in public or they douse one another in champagne. It is well known that Gary Oldman and Tim Roth were also in the running to play Johnny. Frears adds an unlikelier name to the mix. 'Kenneth Branagh came to see me,' says the 84-year-old film-maker. 'Half a second and you knew: 'Well, he's not right.' But good for him for wanting to do it.' The leading candidate seemed clear in Frears's mind, and not only because Day-Lewis threatened to break his legs if he didn't cast him. 'All the girls said: 'You want Dan.' He was top of the crumpet list at the Royal Court.' On screen, he is magnetically minimalist. 'Dan loved Clint Eastwood,' Kureishi points out. 'He loved how still Clint was. You can see the influence: Dan doesn't move very much.' Frears detected the echo of an even older star. 'I remember him standing by the lamppost under the bridge in the scene where he and Omar meet again, and I thought: 'Ah, I see. You want to play it like Marlene Dietrich.'' Kureishi, now 70, was already established as a young playwright before he wrote the film. Not that his father was impressed. 'He hadn't come to this country to see his son doing little plays above pubs,' he says in between sips of kefir. 'He thought I'd never make a living as a writer, so I really wanted to get moving.' Frears once likened reading My Beautiful Laundrette to 'finding a new continent'. In writing it, Kureishi combined scraps of autobiography with cinematic tropes. 'My dad had got me involved with a family friend called Uncle Adi, who ran garages and owned properties. He was kind of a grifter. He took me around these launderettes he owned in the hope that I would run them for him. They were awful fucking places; people were shooting up in there. So I thought I'd write about a bloke running a launderette. Then I thought: 'Well, he needs a friend.' It could be a buddy movie, like The Sting. But I couldn't get a hold on it. Then, as I was writing, they kissed – and suddenly everything seemed more purposeful. Now it was a love story as well as a story about a bloke going into business.' The tension between Omar and Johnny, his formerly racist pal-turned-lover, was drawn from Kureishi's own experience of growing up in south London. 'Lots of my friends had become skinheads. My best friend turned up at my house one day with cropped hair, boots, Ben Sherman shirt, all the gear. My dad nearly had a heart attack. He'd spent a lot of time trying not to be beaten up by skinheads. It was terrifying to be a Pakistani in south London in the 1970s.' Omar's uncle, exuberantly played by Saeed Jaffrey, was similarly lifted from life. 'He was based on a friend of my father's: a good-time boy who had a white mistress.' That lover was played in the film by Shirley Anne Field, star of the kitchen-sink classic Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. 'She was a woman of such grace and elegance,' sighs Kureishi. 'Dan and I would interrogate her all the time: 'Who's the most famous person you've slept with?' She'd slept with President Kennedy. And George Harrison!' He still sounds amazed. When Frears came on board, he made some invaluable suggestions. 'Stephen told me: 'Make it dirty,'' says Kureishi. 'That's a great note. Writing about race had been quite uptight and po-faced. You saw Pakistanis or Indians as a victimised group. And here you had these entrepreneurial, quite violent Godfather-like figures. He also kept telling me to make it like a western.' Frears looks surprised: 'Did I?' Kureishi replies: 'Yeah. I never knew what that meant.' There are visual touches that suggest the genre: a Butch Cassidy-esque bicycle ride, a Searchers-style final camera set-up peering through a doorway, not to mention a magnificent crane shot that hoists us from the back of the launderette and over its roof. 'I think what Stephen meant is that it's about two gangs getting ready to fight. The Pakistani group and the white thugs. There's something coming down the line.' His other note to Kureishi was that the film should have a happy ending. Why? 'We'd asked people to invest so much in these characters,' says Frears. 'And a sad ending is quite easy in an odd sort of way. This one's only happy in the last 10 seconds.' Kureishi agrees: 'Yeah. But you leave the cinema in a cheerful mood.' It was a happy ending for the film-makers, too. Frears recalls one reviewer observing that while Kureishi might not be able to spell, he could certainly write. That reminds me: the story goes that Kureishi deliberately misspelt the title as an indictment of his own education. But he scotches that rumour. 'I'm from Bromley,' he says. 'I thought that was how you spelled it.' If the film was a skyrocket for its writer, it heralded a new chapter for Frears. He had recently made his second film for cinema – the stylish, ruminative thriller The Hit starring Roth, John Hurt and Terence Stamp – 13 years after his debut, Gumshoe. Ironically, My Beautiful Laundrette, which was shot on 16mm for just £600,000, was only intended to be screened on Channel 4. But a rapturous premiere at the Edinburgh film festival, accompanied by acclaim from critics including the Guardian's Derek Malcolm, made a cinema release the only possible launchpad. Kureishi recalls that trip with fondness. 'I was in Edinburgh with Tim Bevan [of Working Title] and Dan, and we all slept in the same room. I made sure I got the bed, and the others were on the floor. Dan didn't even have a suitcase, just a toothbrush. Every night, he'd wash his underwear and his socks in the sink and put them on again the next day.' Blown up to 35mm, this low-budget TV film became a magnet for rave reviews here and in the US (the New Yorker's Pauline Kael called it 'startlingly fresh'), bagged Kureishi an Oscar nomination and helped reinvigorate Frears's movie career, paving the way for later hits including Dangerous Liaisons, The Grifters and The Queen. Neither of them has seen it recently. 'I don't watch my old films,' Frears says with a grimace. 'You either sit there thinking: 'I should have done that better.' Or else: 'That's rather good. Why can't I do that any more?'' I assure them that the picture looks better than ever, whether it's the visual panache of Oliver Stapleton's cinematography or the enchanting subtlety of Warnecke's performance, which was rather overshadowed by Day-Lewis at the time but can now be seen to chart delicately Omar's gradual blossoming. It goes without saying that My Beautiful Laundrette was ahead of its time, especially in its blase approach to queerness. When the picture was released in the UK at the end of 1985, homophobia was becoming more virulent and widespread in the media as cases of Aids escalated. The Conservative government's section 28 legislation, outlawing the 'promotion' of homosexuality by local authorities, was just over two years away. The timing of the film's re-emergence today is not lost on its author. 'It's so hard to be gay now,' says Kureishi. 'There's all this hostility toward LGBT people, so it feels important that the film is out there again in this heavily politicised world where being gay or trans is constantly objectified. It's a horrible time.' Interviewed in 1986 by Film Comment magazine, however, Kureishi dismissed the idea of it as a 'gay film', and derided the whole concept of categories. 'There's no such thing as a gay or black sensibility,' he said then. How does he feel today? 'I still don't want to be put in a category. I didn't like it when people called me a 'writer of colour' because I'm more than that.' The film, too, is multilayered. 'It's about class, Thatcherism, the Britain that was emerging from the new entrepreneurial culture. I didn't want it to be restricted by race or sexuality, and that hasn't changed.' I wonder if it rankles, then, that My Beautiful Laundrette was voted the seventh best LGBTQ+ film of all time in a 2016 BFI poll. And it does – though not for the reason I had anticipated. 'What was above it?' demands Frears in a huff. 'Why didn't it win?' Still, both men are thrilled that the film was embraced by queer audiences. 'If Stephen and I have done anything to make more people gay, we'd be rather proud of that.' My Beautiful Laundrette is in cinemas from 1 August. Frears, Kureishi and Warnecke will take part in a Q&A following a screening on 25 July at the Cinema Rediscovered festival in Bristol
BBC News
4 days ago
- BBC News
Rocky Horror Show cast get ready to Time Warp in Belfast
The cast of the touring production of the Rocky Horror Show have paid homage to one of the show's original stars, who is from Belfast. Patricia Quinn starred in the original stage production and in the film. It is also a "full circle moment" for Connor Carson, from Killinchy in County Down, who is playing Brad Majors in the touring Rocky Horror Show first opened as a stage production in the Royal Court in 1973 and then became a film starring Tim Curry and Susan Sarandon. The popular show has built up a huge cult following over the years as fans follow the adventures of Brad Majors and Janet Weiss who accidentally find themselves in Frank-N-Furter's country mansion living alongside the perfect man Rocky and domestics Riff Raff and Magenta. The iconic Time Warp dance is also a hugely popular feature of the show. Patricia Quinn played Magenta and the Usherette in the Royal Court production and subsequent film. Natasha Hoeberigs is now playing Magenta and the Usherette and is proud to be part of a show with such an important legacy. "Incredible people have come and gone through the show over the years, like the amazing Patricia Quinn," she said."To step into the shoes of a role that she originated, it's a blessing, it's a dream come true," she said. "I grew up as a child in New Zealand watching the film and watching her portrayal and thinking that's amazing,". In Hamilton in New Zealand there is a statue of Riff Raff. Rocky fans have tried to get a Magenta statue organised in Belfast. Ms Hoeberigs believes it "has to happen". "I think we need to start a petition and I think everyone who is a fan of Rocky Horror needs to get on board with this and we must pay homage to Patricia Quinn and her Magenta," she said. "Richard O'Brien has his statue in Hamilton in New Zealand and it would be so special to have one here in Belfast." Connor Carson used to perform in amateur shows in Belfast and Lisburn before training professionally. He has now performed in the West End and Rocky Horror is his first UK tour."The first professional show I ever watched as a little kid was here in the Grand Opera House so it's definitely a full circle moment to come back here and be playing one of the leads in Rocky Horror - it's a pinch me moment," he says it is very comforting to hear Northern Irish accents in the crowd and meeting him at stage door. "It's such an iconic show and people love it so much so it's great to bring that to Belfast as well," he said. "There is pressure here as I've a bunch of family and friends coming to see it this weekend. "It's amazing to be part of something that means so much to people and that they can connect with. It's really special."One of Connor's favourite bits of the show is getting to perform the Time Warp, particularly during the finale. "Doing the Time warp is an iconic piece of choreography, everyone has been doing at primary school discos since they were five years old," he added. The Rocky Horror show is currently playing at the Grand Opera House in Belfast before moving on to Dublin and then the Millennium Forum in Londonderry.
BBC News
7 days ago
- BBC News
'We haven't gone beyond her': How the plays of Sarah Kane sent shockwaves through the 1990s
Thirty years ago, the late British writer's debut play Blasted was castigated as a "feast of filth". Now though, revivals of her work are showing she was ahead of her time. Blasted, the 1995 debut play by the late British playwright Sarah Kane, begins with a couple, Ian and Cate, entering a Leeds hotel room. Ian, a tabloid journalist, is unimpressed, and in the following moments he brandishes a revolver, utters a stream of racist slurs, and commits acts of sexual violence against Cate. It is easy to fixate on these details which set the tone for a play that only gets more harrowing, building to a truly sickening final scene. Warning: This article contains content that some may find disturbing or upsetting With its staging at London's Royal Court Upstairs, Blasted became the biggest theatrical cause célèbre in the UK for decades – and reviewers were scathing. Charles Spencer in the Daily Telegraph called it a work "devoid of intellectual and artistic merit" and even suggested that Kane was mad. Jack Tinker from the Daily Mail's review was headed "This Disgusting Feast of Filth". Many of the press viewed Blasted as a grotesque waste of taxpayers' money, mindlessly squandered by a 23-year-old enfant terrible who was – shockingly – female. The critical tide later turned, with some of those reviewers apologising to Kane for misunderstanding Blasted. Thirty years on, Kane is part of the theatrical canon – a production of 4.48 Psychosis, the final play she wrote before taking her own life aged 28, is currently running at the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon, while a revival of her 1998 work Cleansed is being staged by director Rebecca Frecknall at North London's Almeida Theatre next year. While revivals of Kane's plays are not universally appreciated, they always invite new responses and revelations in relation to contemporary conflict and oppression. But at the core of each work is an abstracted meditation on love. "No one play is the same as the other," Graham Saunders, Professor of Drama Arts at the University of Birmingham, tells the BBC. "It would be difficult to believe that the writer of Blasted was the same person who wrote 4.48 Psychosis". Alongside playwrights including Mark Ravenhill and Patrick Marber, Kane was part of a movement in British theatre in the 1990s often described as "in-yer-face", a phrase defined in the New Oxford English Dictionary as "blatantly aggressive or provocative, impossible to ignore or avoid". Yet that is what many of the critics who saw Blasted attempted to do – to run away from the confrontational aspect of the play by burying it with outrage. Midway through, a third character enters the play: a soldier who details war crimes he has witnessed, confronting the repulsive Ian with the realities of conflict. Kane does not merely gesture towards the then-contemporary horrors of the Balkans War, but rips the stage open and has them erupt into the theatre itself. Blasted removes the temporal and spatial distance between ourselves and trauma, forcing us to face the very worst of humanity. Kane's route to notoriety The daughter of a journalist, Kane was born in 1971 in Brentwood, Essex, and rejected her Christian suburban upbringing from the age of 17. In Ravenhill's obituary of Kane upon her death in 1999, he quotes her saying: "There is an attitude that certain things could not happen here. Yet there's the same amount of abuse and corruption in Essex as anywhere else, and that's what I want to blow open". She drew influences from her musical loves (including Joy Division, Pixies, and Radiohead), modern playwrights, (especially Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter), and classical drama. The latter influence was brought to the fore in Kane's second play, Phaedra's Love, first performed at London's Gate theatre in 1996. Taking a story already given stage treatments by Seneca, Euripides, and Jean Racine, Kane's attention moves to Phaedra's stepson, Hippolytus, and dissects the taboos of incestuous desire. Phaedra's Love ends with an extreme act of mutilation. It is no wonder that Kane's plays are infrequently performed, not only for their challenging subjects, but because they pose enormous staging difficulties. Fellow writer and friend David Greig recalled that Kane said to him that the reason why she featured unstageable images in her plays was because "whatever they do they're going to have to do something interesting". In Cleansed, which premiered at the Royal Court Downstairs in 1998, Kane jokingly decided to "punish" the director, James Macdonald, for making her do a rewrite. After finding a dead rat in her cutlery drawer, Kane included the direction: "The rats carry Carl's feet away." Carl experiences some of Kane's most shocking violence, being subject to the most extreme of torture from a man called Tinker – the surname of the aforementioned Daily Mail journalist who whipped up the lambasting of Blasted in 1995. During the run of Katie Mitchell's staging of Cleansed at London's National Theatre in 2016, a press furore rose again as audience members fainted and walked out at the play's horror. But to focus on the violence is to miss the meaning of Kane's works. Cleansed is set in a university where Tinker leads an institution designed to rid society of its undesirables, while a group of inmates attempt to save themselves through love. Kane was inspired by A Lover's Discourse by Roland Barthes to compare extreme torture to the agony of being in love. Like Barthes, Kane finds the two experiences share the situation of panic, wherein there is no possibility of return. To fall in love is to be lost, forever. Cleansed is graphic, but it is heartachingly beautiful – the lovers Graham and Grace dance together, with her emulating him, until "she mirrors him perfectly as they dance exactly in time". A sunflower bursts through the floor. At another point a field of daffodils covers the entire stage. Light and beauty frequently shine through the most pitiless scenes. Ravenhill recalled that upon telling Kane that he thought Cleansed was brilliant, she smiled and replied, "Yeah, well, I'm in love". A couple of months later, when she directed Georg Büchner's Woyzeck at the Gate, Kane removed the possibility of redemption for any of the characters. "Yeah, well, I fell out of love," Kane explained. As explored in her final two plays, 1998's Crave, and 4.48 Psychosis, Kane had fallen out with the idea of love itself. She wrote Crave under the pseudonym Marie Kelvedon to detach herself from the associations of her name, allowing her to explore a free-flowing poetic narrative through the voices of four characters called C, M, B, and A. The characters mostly exchange single lines, until A bursts into a long monologue about all the little romantic things she wants to do with her lover. The stream of consciousness twists and turns between anger and love in the manner which defines Kane's worldview. Her death and legacy Later, A says, "Death is my lover and he wants to move in". This chimes with the emotions of her final work, 4.48 Psychosis, which explores a state of mind "at 4.48 / when desperation visits". The work comprises 24 sections, without directions or indication of setting, not even of how many actors should perform it. The revival currently running is directed, as it was first time around, by Macdonald, and features the three original actors: Daniel Evans, Jo McInnes, and Madeleine Potter. "It's a play about being a human being," Potter says. "The circumstances might have to do with depression and suicidal despair and psychosis. But the journey is a recognisable, human journey – the search for connection and the longing is universal." Evans reflects that, while Kane took the play form to a different place, "it's almost like we haven't gone beyond that yet – no one has discovered what the next stage is." McInnes adds: "Hopefully this production might have helped inspire new writers to come forward." More like this:• The Shakespeare play that makes audiences faint• Why Requiem for a Dream is still so divisive• Why Gen Z is nostalgia about 'indie sleaze' The Guardian critic Michael Billington dubbed it "a 75-minute suicide note" in his 2000 review. Kane struggled with severe depression and tried to kill herself once before she did so in 1999. But while 4.48 Psychosis might be its artist's cri de coeur, it is as reductive to call it a suicide note as it is to say the same of Sylvia Plath's Ariel poems. After her death, Kane's agent Mel Kenyon said: "I don't think she was depressed, I think it was deeper than that. I think she felt something more like existential despair which is what makes many artists tick." However, in a letter to the Guardian, playwright Anthony Neilson retorted that, "No one in despair 'ticks'", and that, "Truth didn't kill her, lies did: the lies of worthlessness and futility whispered by an afflicted brain." Far more important in terms of Kane's legacy is to focus on the ways in which she played with theatrical form. Reflecting on the power of Kane's work today, Graham Saunders observes that they "respond to #MeToo and issues of coercive control and sexual violence in ways that weren't even recognised or acknowledged when they were first written". Other themes which also come through strongly now include mental health, which is a subject now discussed more openly than when Kane was alive, and body and gender dysmorphia. Imagery recurs in Kane's poetic writing. The emergent flowers in Cleansed recall the end of the first scene of Blasted. Ian and Cate discuss why she came to the hotel with him, ending with him saying, "I love you", and her saying, "I don't love you". Ian picks up a bouquet of flowers and holds them out to Cate. At the start of the second scene the flowers are ripped apart and scattered around the room. Love and beauty have never been shown to be more fragile than in the fraught theatre of Sarah Kane. 4.48 Psychosis is at The Other Place, Stratford-upon-Avon, until 27 July; Cleansed is at London's Almeida Theatre from 21 July until 22 August 2026. * Details of organisations offering information and support for anyone affected by mental health issues and sexual abuse or violence are available at -- For more Culture stories from the BBC, follow us on Facebook, X and Instagram.
