Conserving the freedom to offend
Nan Flory spoke to Richard Thomas about his controversial opera, coming to York’s Grand Opera House in February.
Even in its infancy, Jerry Springer: The Opera, the controversial show by Richard Thomas and Stuart Lee, faced adversity. When he spoke to me from his London office, Thomas, who wrote the opera’s score and collaborated with Lee on the libretto, told me that most people greeted his ambition to make a stage show out of America’s most infamous daytime TV programme with: ‘That’s a rubbish idea’. Then, as now, however, Thomas was not deterred. He had fallen in love with his idea; he said ‘I just wanted to do it and I didn’t really care…it was quite liberating’. His insistence on the unlocked potential for quality theatre in The Jerry Springer Show certainly paid off.
The opera was concived in 2001, in the Battersea Arts Centre, where it consisted of Thomas performing a few songs behind a piano, with two cases of lager as companions. He invited ideas, suggestions, funny comments from the audience, good ones rewarded with a Fosters, bad ones with a can of Asda Own Brand. Not a massivly fruitful technique, he maintains, but thankfuly, he and Stuart Lee came up with enough ideas of their own and packed out a 750 seat venue throughout the 2002 Edinburgh Fringe. From there the opera moved to the National for a four month run, and then to the West End, first at the Lyttleton and then the Cambridge Theatre. In January of this year, a televised version was broadcast on BBC 2, garnering a record 1.7 million viewers and nearly 50,000 complaints.
47,000 of these were sent into the BBC before the broadcast even took place and Thomas was clearly appreciative of the Beeb’s programming directors’ refusals to back down, ‘The BBC were really good,’ he said, ‘there were all these complaints, there were death threats towards their executives but they still said, no, it goes out.’ Most of the complaints came from hardline Christian groups, objecting to the show as offensive to their beliefs and blasphemous, something Thomas rejects. He said, ‘It’s their right in this country to say what they like, to call a thing which they haven’t even the respect to watch a filthy piece of blasphemy, it’s my right to say to those people you are borderline barking’. He backs this up by pointing out that the mainstream religious press gave the opera glowing reviews, on a par with the approving noises made by critics all over the world. He said, that in his experience, ‘A lot of religious people find the show morally uplifting’, and certainly, Mark Thompson, director general of the BBC, whose decision it was to air the show, is himself a practising Christian.
There is no denying. however, that the feelings of outrage the opera has provoked in certain communities are genuine. Christian Voice, a hardline, conservative group, opposed to abortion and homosexuality, instigated much of the public protest. They have a section of their website devoted to explaining their greivances with the show, calling it a ‘mockery’ and ‘deliberat[ly] insult[ing]’. However, they also have an article posted objecting to the recent Racial and Religious Hatred Bill as an infringement on our rights to free speech. They never really justify the dichotamous view that Thomas’ voice should be supressed for causing offence whilst theirs, (which, with their claims that hurricane Katrina’s devastation of New Orleans is punishment for the gay communities Mardi Gras celebrations, provokes equal consternation) deserves to be preserved.
It is a difficult area this issue of rights and responsibility in freedom of expression, and one that has come up a lot recently. Religious debate has become precarious territory for artists, the murder of Dutch film-maker Theo van Gogh by radical Islamist, Mohammed Bouyeri, an example of how dangerous it can be. The Birmingham Rep was forced to cancel its production of Behzti in December last year when members of the Sikh community staged violent protests, something which set a disturbing precedent. Cancelling the show sent out the message that threats and brutality work, something which the survival of Jerry Springer: The Opera will hopefully begin to reverse.
