by Michael Coveney
2/19/1988

This is obviously the week of mother and daughter musicals. And pigs blood. After The Rink and Fugard's new play, the Royal Shakespeare Company unviels Carrie on its main Stratford-upon-Avon stage, where it remains for a mere three weeks. Thence to Broadway, and the Virginia Theatre, opening April 26, in hopes of making money for the company.

Even as I send this report, a deafening firework display on the Avon is blotting out sensible reflections. One thought, however, does come to mind. The bloody nemisis of a hick town girl, who's menstruation, allied with awakening telekenetic powers, destroys an entire West Maine community, could have borrowed a few such graphic explosions. Especially as the designer, Ralph Koltai, has provided a white and grey glassy plastic box set that cries out for a douche of rouge all evening.

I happen to think Stephen King's 1974 novel is a very fine one. Its chilling use of futuristic reportage, pseudo-scientific analyisis and narrative tension struck straight in the heart of Middle American hypocrisies and fanatical deviations. A schoolgirl has her period and is terrified. Her mother hated sex and resents the result. Carrie is jeered at by the other girls and, after a sympathetic teacher has intervened, and a fellow pupil made amends, is newly humiliated at the High School Prom. Her powers return and she destroys the lot of them.

Brian dePalma turned this into a creepily repulsive movie in 1976 and Sissy Spacek made her name. It was very much a mid-1970's film.

The RSC show is similary stuck in that decade, on two counts. First, Michael Gore's music sounds like a discotheque spin-off of Fame and Flashdance, with second act concessions to ballad requirements. Second, Terry Hand's direction, while mercifully releasing himself from his boring leather fetishism of the Alan Howard years, nonetheless sends him spinning into an utter cultural vacuum of dance studio robotics with a hint of cultural and classical pretentions.

Much of this, I hasten to add, is enjoyable in a masochistic way, and for anyone who has not watched Top of the Pops or rock videos for five years, it must all come as something of a surprise. But Hands and his team fail entirely to make any connection between Carrie's menstruation and her devilish powers.

King's Carrie, and to a lesser extent dePalma's, are gripping and terrifying because they deal in disjunction, aberration, in a carefully defined society. That is the extended metaphor of Carrie's period. Hands is best known for his work on period drama, after all. But he shuts out Chamberlain, Maine, he shuts out anything resembling real America. In King's novel, a psychic phenomenologist relates Carrie's birth in 1963 to the Kennedy assassination.

No such intentions here. The Kolcal box is a hothouse first invaded by a stunning chorus of white-slipped girl gymnasts who proceed to slitheringly disrobe in a rising steam shower room. We know what could happen, so the socks and belts are blood red. This is all very fine.

Elsewhere, you see Hands reanimating his Myrmidon impulses courtesy of Debbie Allen's exceptionally ferocious but creatively meaningless choreography. No actor here has ever had anything to do with the RSC before, which may well be just as well. Barabra Cook is superb as a softened-up, born again Christian mother, not at all like the maniac psychotic of book and film. She obviously finds time for the hair dresser. Linzi Hateley is a 17 year-old discovery as Carrie, another Imelda Staunton, but probably better.

I was most taken by Charolette d'Amboise as the scheming, revengeful Chris, a vile leggy post-punker with access to Dad's money. Her partner in crime, Billy is played by Fame star Gene Anthony Ray, who can certainly move his pelvis around but cannot, as yet, overcome an incompetant sound system to convey the crucial lyrics about obtaining pigs blood.

It is typical of the evening that such a fault does not seem to matter. In King, Billy's the great part. Here, all he really gets to do is stuff an empty bucket on Carrie's head.