Tim Curry, or rather, the ‘camp’ before ‘camp’

You never forget your first camp experience. Ours was "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" starring Tim Curry – standing at 1 metre 72, in a corset with garters and fishnet stockings – who declares himself a ‘sweet transvestite from Transylvania’ and disturbs the sleep of Janet – played by Susan Sarandon, then a shy young woman looking for a husband. Rocky – his laboratory-created creature with half a brain – also seduces Brad, the betrothed, a strapping lad who’d dragged Janet off on an adventure through the woods. The moral of the story: avoid castles during thunderstorms.

We had not read “Notes on Camp”, Susan Sontag’s essay illustrating the aesthetic and sensibility embodied by Tim Curry in fishnet stockings. “Artifice, exaggeration, theatricality, extravagance, the predominance of style over substance and of appearance over reality, the hideous bordering on the sublime”. And furthermore: a taste for playfulness, for disguise and for certain objects considered kitsch – that is to say, the attempt to imitate models that are out of reach. With results that people of good taste find ridiculous, yet which the camp sensibility appreciates and relishes. 

A cultured aside: differences do exist, for those who look closely. A Mona Lisa on cheese slice packets can be compared to the one with the moustache drawn by Salvador Dalí; it’s amusing but doesn’t help sell the product. On the other hand, Botticelli’s “Primavera”, with its curls, travelling the length and breadth of Italy extolling its beauties in the Ministry of Tourism’s advert, is unmitigated kitsch. A sprinkling of culture that elevates the advert.

Let us return to the “Rocky Horror Picture Show”, a title of epic length that reveals the theatrical origins of a film which, without much fanfare, embodied the “unnatural style” so dear to Oscar Wilde. Nature, he writes, “reveals its design flaws; it is crude and has a sense of incompleteness compared to art”. This is the exact opposite of what happens today: Nature is celebrated, whilst artifice is regarded as the scourge of the cultural world. Hence the dominance of autobiography, the devaluation of expertise, and everything that lies far from that sentimental little heart that beats and goes thump-thump.

The show began as a musical, back in 1973. A hilariously bizarre tale featuring Dr Frank-n-Furter, an alien, queer vampire comfortably ensconced with his servants in a castle somewhere in the US. There, soaking wet, arrive the betrothed couple who have lost their way. It is a parody of horror films, and also – or so we like to believe, at least – a hilarious antidote to the long-awaited and much-celebrated Age of Aquarius, then as now.

Tim Curry, a British singer and musician who had moved to Los Angeles, with his lips painted black and his curly hair, had starred in “Hair”. He had played the Transylvanian cross-dresser on the stage, before appearing in Jim Sharman’s film, and had also performed on stage – at prestigious London theatres such as the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Royal National Theatre – in Peter Shaffer’s “Amadeus”. The years had passed, but his love of pop culture remained – he didn’t live by Shakespearean cross-dressing alone – and in the early 2000s he had spent three years on tour with the Monty Python musical “Spamalot” (a cross between “Camelot” and the highly inadvisable tinned meat, Spam).

On television, he had played the killer clown Pennywise in the 1990 miniseries based on Stephen King’s novel "It". There is much to remember from his incredibly rich career as a true actor, capable of transforming his appearance and taking on a wide range of roles. To conclude, let us focus on his role as Gomez Addams, husband of Morticia.