ANYONE FOR TEDDY?: Throw a Rocky Horror Dinner Party, it’ll be bloody marvellous

{JSON.stringify(article.attachments[0], null, 2)} --> I think perhaps you’d better come inside and take a seat at the dinner table. The master is having one of his affairs…

Grizzle and gore become the themes of The Rocky Horror Show soon after you settle into your theatre (or cinema) seat, and it’s what the millions of fans of this now veteran musical love. You go with an absurd glee in the ghastly things that are about to unfold right before your eyes. You relish the unpleasantness of it all.

And it’s all surprisingly “refeened”, to use a pronunciation of refined used by an old and much missed friend. “Too refined pour moi, darling,” he might have said. Frank-N-Furter, the transvestite scientist at the core of the show, might have said that too, though he didn’t. If we think Frank-N-Furter’s personal pronoun would have been “moi”, I have no doubt it would have been, but in the show, he does not say the word.

Frank is frightfully posh, but as cunning, duplicitous and mean as hell.

The mad doctor-scientist, as personified by Tim Curry in the movie following his huge success in the London stage show from 1973 onwards, was front of mind as we drove out to the theatre, for Curry had just died, even after our tickets had been reserved. So the next two hours became something of a ritual of honouring and remembering the actor and the role with which he was and will forever be associated.

Curry fell naturally into the film role he became world-famous for, because he had already played the role in London’s West End from 1973 onwards. Curry wore thigh-high boots to his audition, which he’d spray-painted silver. For early shows, he spoke in a jokey German accent, but one day he was on the London underground and overheard a posh woman refer to her “hice” in the country. (“Oh, I have a marvellous country hice!” Something like that.)

Hice is the classic royal pronunciation of house, and Curry decided on the spot that Frank should speak like the queen. I was once told, by a famous South African stage actress who had studied at RADA (London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts), that at RADA students are taught to say “a rind and a bite the hice” for “around and about the house”.

Rocky Horror and I (to diminutise the show’s name in the way you do for an old friend) go back a long way. I knew the album when it first came out. The music and its songs, especially Time Warp, Sweet Transvestite, Over at the Frankenstein Place and Dammit Janet, received plenty of radio play in South Africa in the day, despite censorship restrictions. Our generation knew all the songs and all the lyrics.

A younger me even dolled up as Frank-N-Further for one of our Rocky Horror-themed parties in the late Eighties.