R.I.P. Tom O’Horgan

Tom O’Horgan, the man who brought nudity to London’s West End, died on 11 January 2009. Michael Coveney’s excellent obituary of ‘the big daddy of the modern rock musical’ ran in The Guardian on 21 January.

O’Horgan – not least as the director who first staged Hair and Jesus Christ Superstar – figures prominently in my thesis. Coveney makes many highly perceptive observations about O’Horgan’s artistic reputation, which soared and plummeted (in both cases sometimes unjustly) during his lifetime. O’Horgan personified, in many ways, the often artificially-amplified tensions between the ‘Counter-Cultural’ and ‘the mainstream’; ‘experimental’ and ‘conventional’ theatre; ‘artistic integrity’ versus ‘selling-out’.

As Coveney notes, O’Horgan’s ‘style of direction…was organically evolved in the off-off-Broadway theatre of the mid-1960s and rooted in an alternative lifestyle and the hippy culture’. By 1971 Hair and Superstar were two of four O’Horgan productions running on Broadway. ‘This was his time’, however, and, sadly, ‘he never really thrived beyond it’. In large part, this was because ‘O’Horgan attracted scorn from the critical avant garde, who felt he had sold out, and disdain from the purists for his wacky, outrageous style of synthesising many influences’. Such ‘avant garde scorn’, combined with the commercial disaster of O’Horgan’s 1972 production of Dude by MacDermot and Ragni would, ultimately, result in O’Horgan’s rather sad – but not unjustifiable – reflection ‘in 1993 that he had been put on “an enemies list” by critics and other members of the theatrical establishment’.

Current theatre historiography consistently paints a thumbnail sketch of O’Horgan as a man of sound ‘counter-cultural’ credentials and great artistic ability, both of which were squandered through ‘selling out’ and hubristic excess. This simplistic narrative has been parroted

- repeatedly and uncritically – in many theatre histories. Coveney’s obituary goes some way towards rehabilitating a director whom Ellen Stewart of Cafe LaMama considered the equal of Jerzy Grotowski (which is why she employed both young directors simultaneously). Grotowski is still revered: O’Horgan is not. Yet it could be argued that the impact of O’Horgan’s work has been equally profound; not least through the worldwide phenomenon of Hair and the impact it had upon commercial theatre and, in particular, The Musical as a genre.

Sometime an artistic ‘style’ simply goes out of fashion. The key question in O’Horgan’s case is: who decided that his style had ‘gone out of fashion’?

Photo: http://www.michaelbutler.com/hair/holding/photographs/hair