“I’d like people to leave the theater,” said West End producer Michael White, “wanting to have sex with whomever or whatever.” Now that New York has given us “the Hair of the Nineties” in Rent, it was inevitable that sooner or later “the Oh, Calcutta! of the Nineties” 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 they’d been wrong then and were therefore wrong now. “The Daily Mail described it as a big yawn. The Sketch said it was dismal,” he recalled. “Only Harold Hobson, in The Sunday Times, broke from the pack, saying it was a classic example of the British inability to deal with sex. It’s exactly the same kind of language today, and Hobson is still right.”

Very well. Let’s 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 we’re dealing with here is the stage representation of sex—which is an even trickier maneuver. Oh, Calcutta!had one striking moment—right 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