Review by W Stephen Gilbert, Plays and Players, October 1976.

Let’s do the time-warp again. Three happy summers ago, your correspondent (along, I expect, with Time Out) was the first fortunate to come raving up the line with news of a delirious piece of rock camp called The Rocky Horror Show. It was the right event at the right time (10.15 at night and just before the daft days gave way to grey revisionism) in the right place (the Theatre Upstairs in its first, raunchier manifestation).

Well, it’s later and wiser now. And T Zee at 9.00 in the Court’s main auditorium is rather as if the Marcels had released, say, ‘There’s a Small Hotel’ as a follow-up to ‘Blue Moon’ in the wake of the Beatles’ transformation of the pop landscape. T Zeelooks so mean and thin that one goes back to one’s enjoyment of Rocky Horror, fearful of the temptation to rewrite history and say it wasn’t so.

I think the analogy with chart singles is appropriate here because Richard O’Brien has done exactly the same silly trick that old-fashioned pop stars used to do; he’s tried to pull off the mix as before. So Frank-n-furter, Brad and Janet, Rocky, Eddie and the AC/DC strain from the first have become Bone Idol, Eugene and Alison, T Zee, Dr Death and a touch of S ‘n’ M in the second. Except, of course, that the second lot both lack the element of surprise and are pale shadows of their precursors. Bone Idol, for instance, is no more outrageous a creation than a Hollywood rock-hype artist, suggesting Wolfman Jack playing out the fantasy. Where the ambisextrous [sic] Frank-n-furter gave Tim Curry scope to invent a mile-high neon, Bone Idol only inspires Paul Nicholas to swagger a bit, corpse occasionally, and look completely pretty.

It may be that Rocky Horror itself had no substance but it seemed to crystallise a moment and it did so under firm direction from Jim Sharman. Nicholas Wright’s staging of T Zee, however, is prey to false starts and dead ends - or, at least, it allows false starts and dead ends to reveal themselves all over the project. Thus Brian Thomson’s setting seems to indicate a circus version of Chicago but nothing that follows justifies either the allusions or the money spent on them - at least two stairways visible from my seat had never a foot set on them. Similarly, Richard Hartley’s music sets off on the promise of a unifying hoedown-rock infrastructure but the melodies soon disappear into generalised anonymity. The majestic Diane Langton - who comes on like a graduate of St Trinian’s on her way, via dozens of costume changes, to being crowned as Boedicea - beings a delightful post-coital ballad which then segues into something rather less memorable (whatever it was, I’ve forgotten it).

And so it goes on. The show brings on a gaggle of mutants and then spends half of the evening wondering what to do with them. It takes the Tarzan legend as a readymade and then goes no further than the assertion of it, leaving T Zee an inchoate cypher compared with the wholly original Rocky Horror. Warren Clarke brings some rough-hewn panto-style elan to the role but all he can hope to get is sympathy. O’Brien has given himself a nothing part as the pulling Eugene; Arthur Dignam makes quite a lot of the elusive Beast, Doctor Death, and Belinda Sinclair, like Ms Langton, sings a treat.

But the application of the cast is not enough to hide the emptiness of the project, and the audience, resolutely unmoved throughout, file out at the end as silent as if from a funeral. T Zee is a melancholy event - an anachronism, all camped up and nowhere to go.