Theater September 1996
The imposture of Martin Guerre
On Martin Guerre & other plays
“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...
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