Remember Jerry Springer, the Opera? That was fun

It was a stage show by Richard Thomas and Stewart Lee. Here’s what I wrote in May 2003:

Regime change on either side of the river Thames is producing dangerously unforseen consequences. At the National Theatre, Nicholas Hytner announced his new era on Wednesday with the most foul-mouthed, blasphemous, sexually explicit, self-referential entertainment ever to be seen on the uncensored London stage. Jerry Springer – The Operawas a shocker that turned a respectable first-night audience into a baying chat show mob, yelling ‘loser!’ and ‘Jerry!’ until the ersatz host and his warm-up man emerged to tranquilize them with practised smiles.

A production of this kind would, a decade ago, have provoked spluttering editorials and questions in the house. The absence of outrage signified a climate change in public opinion that Hytner must have sensed when he plucked the show from the adventurous Battersea Arts Centre. A Carmelite nun might perhaps have been disturbed by the sight of Jesus in nappies – but not for very long, because Springer – The Opera constantly sends up its own assertions. Every line, both verbal and musical, is ambiguously literal and self-critical – a triumph of post modern irony.

Ostensibly a parody of the unutterably watchable US confessional box, now in its twelfth season of I-slept-with-a-transsexual prurience, Springer – The Opera throws open a pandora’s box of identity issues and moral conundra. It deconstructs theatre, opera, television, celebrity power and, not least, audience manipulation by obliging a sophisticated theatre audience to behave like mindless television goons. It is, among other things, poisonously funny, angry and slightly mad. If this is how Hytner sees the National, its future will demand serious watching. (Read on here.)

I also reviewed it for WNYC.