Stewart Lee & Richard Thomas
Stewart Lee & Richard Thomas on
Jerry Springer – The Opera
Interviewed by Emma Freud, Lyttelton Theatre, 16 September 2003
EF Twenty-three years ago, I sat in the audience at the National Theatre and watched two men dressed as Roman soldiers simulate anal sex for about thirty seconds. Following the outcry that ensued, the incident nearly cost the National Theatre its government grant. Four nights ago I sat in the audience at the National Theatre and saw a chorus of American trailer-trash sing the words “What a cunt, what a cunt, what a cunting, cunting, cunt!”, and a crowd of perfectly grown-up theatre-goers cheered. Jerry Springer – The Opera is the first full length opera ever staged at the National, the most shocking, foul-mouthed, explicit production ever seen here, and certainly the first to feature a coprophiliac, nappy-wearing masochist. What's so particularly fabulous about it is that it was written by a jingle-writer and directed by a stand-up comedian.
Are you still pinching yourselves that this is happening here?
SL Well, I haven't anything to compare it with, so it's just confusing, and a constant source of delight.
RT Better than playing the Cafe Royale in 1987, in a boxing ring, following a boxing match, and having bottles thrown...
EF That was your roots, wasn't it?
RT Yes, Stewart was a stand-up and I used to do a sort of music act, on keyboards, doing a kind of Victor Borge thing. Sometimes I still wake up sweating, thinking about it.
EF Where did you get interested in opera?
RT When I was about 19 I was selling icecream in Vienna. You could get into the Vienna Staatsoper for the price of a cup of coffee. I remember seeing Queen of the Night and this woman came on and sang the Queen of the Night aria, which completely blew me away, I still think it's one of the greatest show-stoppers of all time. She just stood there, raised up in the clouds, sang the bollocks out of this tune, and from that moment I thought “I'd like a bit of this at some point.” About ten years ago I met Lore Lixenburg, who plays Baby Jane in Jerry Springer. I saw her in an avant-garde gig where she did this ridiculous Blues by doing something called extended vocal technique, which is basically insanity, backed up by technique. I found it really funny. I was laughing hysterically, and I thought, 'This woman's fantastic, I've got to work with her'. I engineered it a few years later via various friends, when I actually went to her for singing lessons. I can't sing for shit but I thought I'd pay to just get in with her. I finally said, “I remember seeing you years ago…”, and she said “Oh, it was YOU. I got sacked from that because you were laughing.” It's quite a funny story, but it's true.
EF So you started writing for her?
RT Yes.
SL We used to do a club night at a pub (which isn't there any more) called the Market Tavern in Islington, from about 1993 to 1997. We did a show which was me, and Richard and Lore doing music stuff, and it was compered by a comedian called Simon Munnery, and the opera bits were used for heckle put-downs. So when a member of the audience was heckling, Richard would shout out a number to Lore and she'd have all these scatalogical put-downs which she'd sing to the audience.
EF Like what?
RT Well, “Fuck off, you cunt” was one.
SL But sung!
RT What was interesting was that you found out how to write a line so that you can understand it, how to get the diction right. Especially in comedy, you have to get it right because if you don't, if you've taken on the audience and they can't understand the line, you've lost.
SL There's an assumption that people don't like opera. But it's just finding a different context for it. You'd get people coming along to these ostensibly cabaret/comedy gigs and responding really well to a style of music they weren't expecting to find there.
RT We're bringing opera to a wider audience, so they can hate it too.
EF So, when back in 2000, you had the idea of doing Jerry Springer as an on-stage entertainment, why did opera feel like the right medium to put it into?
RT Partly because I'd done a one-act opera called Tourette's Diva, it was about a psychotic relationship between a mother and a daughter, and I'd wanted to make it as violent as possible. It was kind of an antidote to TV, I wanted to do the most uncommercial thing I could think of, just on the grounds that maybe it might be commercial. I found from that that there's something about opera that diminishes the violence of language, you can just get away with a lot. There's also something very stupefying about a woman swearing in opera. So I thought Jerry Springer was the obvious thing to do next.
SL Sometimes when you see a piece of musical theatre or an opera and someone comes on and does a long solo or an aria, you think, “Why are you going on about that?” But in American talk shows, the convention is that people come on, and go on for far too long, unbidden, about deeply private personal things. So you immediately leapfrogged a problem that a person like me, who isn't really familiar with opera has, which is how do you suspend the disbelief that a person would actually go on about these things. Because you are using that talk show format, the insanely heightened passions that you have in an American talk show find a natural reflection in opera. I think any opera which isn't about an American talk show is stupid.
EF I do love that! Here's a director of the National's first full-length opera, and he's never seen any opera or musical theatre before.
SL No, I'd seen none.
RT I've seen loads.
SL It was an accident, because Rich brought me in to help rewrite the second half and plot it. Initially we developed it in workshops at Battersea Arts Centre. There wasn't any money, so we could either afford another singer or a director, and I was in the building anyway, so he asked me to do it, to save money.
RT And you were unemployed.
SL Yeah, I'd been sacked from everything else I was doing, or it had been cancelled.
EF Was there a method in the way you directed it?
SL My main thing as a director is that people need to face the front and you have to be able to hear what they're saying. I haven't got very good hearing and often when I go to the theatre I can't hear what the actors are saying. But if you can see them, you can have a stab at lip-reading. The comic timing is all in the rhythm of what Richard's written, so you don't have to grope around for that. Basically, if you try to gloss it or interpret it, it starts to go wrong. In this, people either mean what they're saying or else what they are saying is the opposite of what they mean. Once you've cracked that it's OK. It's not like it's a Shakespeare play that's been done a hundred times and you've got to think of a new way of putting a spin on it. In fact the main thing to do was to just back off it.
RT I wrote it originally for myself and ten hand puppets.
SL Yes, Richard did it originally as a half hour show on his own, called 'How to write an opera about Jerry Springer', where he did little bits and talked about how he would do it if he ever did it, then did the Jerry Springer lines, for some reason, in the voice of Woody Allen.
EF That was when the show first got tried out at the Battersea Arts Centre. You had lawyer incidents then, didn't you?
RT The initial idea was to try it out; if it's rubbish, you cut it and don't bother. It's quite hard work writing a show. The longest I had written was about an hour, and I'd been pretty tired after that. Also, when I was writing it, there was absolutely no comic potential left in the theme of Jerry Springer because everyone had been satirising it. So I thought I'd try ten or fifteen minutes, see if it's any good, and if it's rubbish, I won't bother. I wanted to do a two-hour show, which I thought would be twice as hard as doing one hour. Wrong. It's about twenty times as hard. The first fifteen minutes went really well. We got a few singers in, did it in May, that went really well. Stew came and saw that and said he'd help me write a second act.
EF Though you had to bribe the audience, back then?
RT Yes, it was called 'A Beer for an Idea'.
SL The people in the audience gave ideas about how it could develop, and Rich gave them a can of quality lager if he thought it was a good suggestion, one from Asda if he didn't. The idea of BAC Scratch Nights was that you could try an unfinished piece or just half an idea, as long as you go on before and apologise, and then invite people to talk to you afterwards. The first year or eighteen months of this show's development began with an apology. You'd go out and say “We just wrote this bit yesterday, we're not sure if it will work, and there aren't any costumes or set; the first half hour's there and there's fifteen minutes at the end, and we'll just explain the middle bit; then please come in the bar afterwards and tell us what you think”.
EF So you workshopped it three times?
RT Actually four... Once on my own, then with four singers, then the first act in the summer with eleven or twelve people, then in February with two acts, then at the Edinburgh Festival.
EF At what stage did the Jerry Springer people find out about it?
SL In February 2002, between the last run at Battersea and the Edinburgh Festival. It was Studios USA who own The Jerry Springer Show. They weren't very happy about it, but one of our producers sent them the libretto, to try and get them to invest.
EF Like that would help?
SL Well, it didn't. It made it worse. They objected on the grounds of language and religious and sexual content, which is odd, given the programme. Then Jerry Springer wanted to meet us, we met him at the Dorchester, and before he came in, Rich said to me “Don't tell him he dies at the end of the first act”. Then he came in and said, “I hear I die at the end of the first act.”
RT I said, “Jerry, you come out of the show really well, but you do come out of it dead.”
SL Then he saw it in Edinburgh, and I think he was expecting it to be a satirical attack on him, and while it is a lot of thing, bizarrely it isn't that, because Rich is a huge fan of the programme, and I've tried really hard to have no opinion about it, so that what he wrote wasn't prejudiced by me trying to have an idea that it should be an attack on Springer. As someone who wrote for Spitting Image, that was kind of what you did with personalities. I think he was pleasantly surprised at Edinburgh. It isn't a eulogy, but it isn't an attack. I think he was expecting to be a big man and take it on the chin. But what happened was that by half-time the audience realised he was in there and started chanting his name and cheering. We hid to watch his reaction, and there's one line (I'm not sure if it's still in), about him sleeping with a prostitute. He didn't laugh at that, but his security guards were really laughing.
But now, we've done this at the National Theatre and no-one's stopped it, I assume it's OK. But that's the reason for the line, when the devil says to Jerry “Will you come to hell and do a show?” he says he can't because he's under exclusive contract to Studios USA.
EF So, you say it's not a satire and it's not a eulogy. What is it? It's full of bad language.
RT The great thing about music theatre/opera is that you can have two very fundamentally opposite things happening at the same time in two different languages. So someone can be saying “You fucking bitch,” while the music can be saying, “I really need you to stay because I'm terribly lonely”. That's what's fascinating for me, that's the challenge musically. You got a kind of stealth, yearning emotion going on in the music, and this ridiculous obscenity coming out of their mouths.
EF What is the point of the show, are you making a point and if so, what?
SL If you watch an episode of the Jerry Springer Show – which I tried not to do for three years, since I got involved – you'll know that at the end of every episode, Jerry makes a little speech, trying to give the impression that the show has some point. He comes up with a weird mixture of folksy, homespun wisdom and platitudes. The message (whether it's a show about transsexuals who haven't told their partners that they're men, or that they're sleeping with animals, whatever), the message is always “Has anybody got hurt? Does it matter? Not really. So stop judging them, go home and forget about it.”
RT “Judge not lest ye be judged.” “Take care of yourselves, and each other…”
SL The show itself, in terms of the variety of the cast, of the audience, everything about it has been quite inclusive and generous. Springer's argument about the show, as a former liberal politician – anti war and all the classic sixties liberal moves – is that it provides a platform for people who are otherwise disenfranchised. There's a general feeling of inclusiveness about it. The final speech Jerry gives is broadly about tolerance of different people, and curiously the only paper that gave it a bad review was the Daily Mail.
EF Are you saying that ultimately the show is saying the same thing that Jerry Springer says on his programme?
SL I don't know. I view this as entirely separate from The Jerry Springer Show. Richard is very caught up in knowing about The Jerry Springer Show and I tried to not find out about it and to think about how this would work on its own terms, partly because I didn't want the audience to have to know lots of things about the conventions of American chat shows in order to relate to it. We have chosen to read the message of The Jerry Springer Show in a particular way that suits this show. It doesn't really matter; it's just source material. I'm not really interested in what Jerry Springer is like himself. What's more important is: does the Jerry Springer in this do the job that drives the show along?
RT I think it's a comedy about pain.
SL The more pain people are in, the funnier it gets.
RT It's about pain, emotional yearning, tragic waste and shame, all those things you feel when you're unemployed.
EF Isn't it also slightly about the way the more open and vulnerable people make themselves on TV, the more famous they become, which is why they wanted to go on The Jerry Springer Show in the first place.
RT There's an element of that, but the guests also have this absolute need for confession, and where do you confess? If you've got no opportunities and you're fucked in life, where do you go? You've got to remember what a phenomenon The Jerry Springer Show was when it first came out. The show came out in America and these people were given some kind of voice. Interestingly enough, the term 'trailer-trash' wasn't coined from The Jerry Springer Show, it was from a critic, and we don't use it in our show.
SL People have said that it's about the fact that the more you're prepared to expose yourself, the more famous you become. When it opened, people who hadn't seen it assumed it would be an anti-American satire – there was a lot of anti-Americanism in the air because of the Iraq war. A lot of think pieces are being written at the moment about TV's responsibility to the individual because of things like Big Brother. There isn't a moment in our production where a character says, “This is the message of the show”. People impose different things on it and I'm quite happy for that to happen. As long as no-one would go away from it thinking that it's meant to be an attack on disenfranchised working-class Americans, I don't really care.
EF I think one of the genius things is that there's an incredibly open sense about the show – we're not told what to think, you don't hit us over the head with a big moral.
RT There's also quite a Blakean thing that Stew brought to the second half. Jerry Springer is such a great chancer, his show is a global phenomenon, but you can't help liking him. He's a chancer, and a charmer, and he got lucky. We had a great discussion about how he should get killed, and I really wanted it to be an accident, just like the show is accidentally a hit.
EF There was an expectation before it opened, that this show was going to answer, in some way, the problems of programming in London's West End, reinvent modern opera, and be a landmark production for all those reasons. That must have been a hell of a pressure while you were rehearsing.
RT The pressure was getting the final re-write right – we'd re-written it six or seven times – worrying whether people would think we'd cured the second half problems and had a two-act show.
SL I always felt more under pressure from those expectations than about whether we'd answered questions about accessibility for opera, and “where now for musical theatre?” Having never seen a piece of musical theatre, and having no knowledge of there having been a problem, it didn't really make any difference.
RT Now we're going to the West End, we have to sell the message even harder: Even though it's an opera, you're not going to be bored, you'll enjoy it.
Audience question:
We saw this show in Edinburgh and now we've seen it in London, and I've never heard a British audience respond in the way they do to this – screaming and laughing. I think audiences in America, if it should go there, would have more trouble with Act Two, because of its blasphemy, than with Act One.
SL I'm not a religious person, but I don't think it is blasphemous. In the first half you have a load of ordinary people who have classic, dysfunctional family relationships. In the second half, we replay those relationships by using mythological characters from the Christian religion, many of whom have been in the same situations. I think it gives the people in the first half a sort of dignity. Secondly, in the same way as we have to treat the Jerry Springer Show and the people in it with respect to make this funny, there wouldn't have been much point in doing a blasphemous take on the creation myth in the second half, because you would have undermined it.
There have been Christian commentators who seem to have enjoyed the fact that it's pretty thorough in its theology. It all adds up. One of the complaints I had in Battersea was from a woman who does secular funerals for the National Secular Society, who was disappointed that we'd “fallen into the trap of using the Christian story, and wasn't it time that was ignored?” You open a can of worms as soon as you use any religious imagery. The key thing to me was bringing in stuff from William Blake, from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, which is about moral relativism, really: you can't give the same law to the ass as you give to the ox because they are instinctively different animals and they have different powers. That seemed to me to equate with Jerry Springer's non-judgemental attitude. He talks about reading the Bible and taking away a more energetic message from it than the one that's traditionally taken away by more bland religious people. I think that's what we infuse into the religious aspects of the second half.
EF You may not have seen a musical, but you know your Blake!
Audience question:
The hardest thing in art is supposedly to follow up an initial success. Have you got any plans?
RT At the end of Act One, the problem was how to top fifteen Ku-Klux Klansmen dancing? So, at the end of Act Two, thirty-three Jerry Springers dance! In the end, it's all about maths.
SL I don't see Jerry Springer as leading to anything, really, it just feels like a strange blip, not on any career ladder. It would be nice to find something to get involved in right at the start again, and see it on a four-year journey. When Richard got me involved with this, I thought it would be like every other bit of fringe comedy you do: they last about two months and you don't get paid, then you do something else. But it's been three years now.
Audience question:
In the second act, when Jerry says “I'm Jewish, I can't go to hell!”, I wondered if you wanted him still to be thinking of himself as a Jewish man who doesn't have Satan and hell, yet could participate in it?
SL I think the main thing about that line is that it just has the rhythm of a New York Jewish stand-up comedy gag. Because this show grew up having no budget, there were certain things we did just because they were cheap, but they turned out to be funny, and things that were in there just as patches between musical movements. It evolved rather than being conceived. I tried not to find out about Jerry Springer because I didn't want knowledge of what he was really like to affect the show in any way, but his family were Jewish immigrants to New York, on the run from the holocaust, and he was actually born here in London, on their way there. I think that fact has informed him, and way back down the line, he has obviously done a bit of mental gymnastics with himself and convinced himself that The Jerry Springer Show is about stopping that ever happening again because by seeing neo-Nazis talking on television, we realise how inherently absurd they are, and therefore no-one will vote for them. Also, if we see a man who has sex with a horse on television, that helps somehow…
RT It does! It helped me.
SL I think the fact that he has Jewish roots and is in America as an outsider, an immigrant, as a result of being on the run from persecution, is the little double-deal he's done in his brain to justify the show: by letting people speak you can remind them of important things.
Audience question:
How difficult was it to find the perfect Jerry Springer?
RT We were meeting people for the part, and Michael Brandon stumbled through the door early, went “Ah, so sorry,” and disappeared, and I thought, “He's fantastic.” Then Stew and the producers, Jon Thoday and Allan McKeown, went to LA and New York to audition people, and I'd be on the phone asking “Was it as funny as when Michael came in early?”
SL The first Jerry Springer we had in Battersea was Rick Bland, who is in the Reduced Shakespeare Company. He's Canadian and looked very like a young Jerry Springer, and turned out to be really good. We didn't audition anyone for that; he was just someone we'd met who had a vaguely American accent.
RT It was really important that it had to be an American because of the music.
SL What Rick brought to the role was that he was very likeable on stage, and Michael had that same quality. A quite useful way of thinking about it was – you know that film Being John Malkovich, in which there is a doorway into John Malkovich's brain, and people go on rides in his head? I read that John Malkovich had been complaining to the director that he wouldn't say some of the lines he'd been given, and he was playing himself, so he would know. The director said, “No, you wouldn't say that John, but The Malkovich would.” So we always talk about The Springer, as opposed to Jerry Springer. Our Springer has to do certain things that Jerry Springer wouldn't necessarily do. What was fortuitous about Michael, on top of all the things that were instinctively right about him, was that he found out subsequently that he grew up in the same New York neighbourhood as Jerry, at exactly the same time.
EF I read that Jerry Springer was hoping to be cast when you make the film of the show. He said he was up against Harvey Keitel, and felt that Harvey Keitel was probably a better actor, but that he looked more like Jerry Springer.
SL You read all this stuff, but there's been no talk about a film at all.
EF Can either of you reveal a secret about yourself?
SL OK, my secret is, being someone who's not directed anything of any scale before, I was very nervous about being found out. So I tried to avoid having any conversations with other directors in the building, in case they asked me what stage right was, or something like that. I got into quite a sticky conversation with Peter Gill, who was directing a new Irish play, where it was evident that I had no idea what I was talking about. For the first three months I was here, I kept seeing Peter Hall around the building, and I kept NOT going down corridors or ducking into toilets in case he said, “Ah, you're doing that opera. Will you be doing so-and-so”, and I wouldn't know what he was talking about. Then, when we moved into the Lyttelton, I saw Peter Hall backstage, sawing up some wood, and realised he was a carpenter who looked like Peter Hall.
RT And my secret is I'm a horse.
Jerry Springer – The Opera opened at the National Theatre on 9 April 2003; it transferred to the Cambridge Theatre on 14 October 2003
