βIβd like people to leave the theater,β said West End producer Michael White, βwanting to have sex with whomever or whatever.β Now that New York has given us βthe Hair of the Ninetiesβ in Rent, it was inevitable that sooner or later βthe Oh, Calcutta! of the Ninetiesβ would show up. White produced both Oh, Calcutta! and the Johnny-come-lately Voyeurz and, after Voyeurz (at the Whitehall Theatre) opened to predictably dismal reviews, he pulled out his Oh, Cal cuttings to demonstrate theyβd been wrong then and were therefore wrong now. βThe Daily Mail described it as a big yawn. The Sketch said it was dismal,β he recalled. βOnly Harold Hobson, in The Sunday Times, broke from the pack, saying it was a classic example of the British inability to deal with sex. Itβs exactly the same kind of language today, and Hobson is still right.β
Very well. Letβs try to deal with sex. Or, rather, not with sex: the British, like everyone else, deal with that in a million different ways in the privacy of their own homes. What weβre dealing with here is the stage representation of sexβwhich is an even trickier maneuver. Oh, Calcutta!had one striking momentβright at the top of the show, when the cast appeared one by one and individually disrobed against a backdrop of various informal photographic blow-ups of their clothed selves. Presumably, Kenneth Tynan was keen to emphasize from the start that each player was not an