The Mail on Sunday - 17th February 2002
Jerry Springer: the Opera
Battersea Arts Centre, London
*****
Georgina Brown
Theatre

On the other side of the river, Battersea Arts Centre is becoming another increasingly thrilling powerhouse. Tom Morris's latest project, still in development, is Jerry Springer: the Opera, a thoroughly modern musical that does something musicals rarelyéfv do: it holds a mirror up to the contemporary world and reveals it to be sick.

Witty, inventive, funny, camp, dirty and in seriously gross taste, this is satire of Springer-style confessional telly. The studio audience of trailer trash are gagging for some squalid action ("Bring on the losers...") their throbbing chorus of "Jerry, Jerry..." as impassioned as the Kyrie of a sung mass.

Divinely blasphemous, of course, but Jerry is to them a sort of high priest, God's representative on Earth, which is why it is appropriate that sinners should turn to him to publicly and ritually confess their guiltiest secrets and then receive his absolution. One by one the guests appear: a "chick with a dick"; a big guy in a bigger nappy who wants to be babied by his lover; a woman past her best-by date who movingly sings of her dream of becoming a lap-dancer.

For each of them, this is their "Jerry Springer moment" for which they expect, with some relish, their just and deserved punishment: "Dip me in chocolate and throw me to the lesbians."

The second half is a fantasia springing from Jerry's subconscious mind (he's been shot), a wildly entertaining, sub-Miltonesque, philosophical debate that builds to a hilarious climactic duet between Satan (the warm-up guy) and Jesus (the nappy fetishist) about good and evil.

It dares to pose a semi-serious question: Did these sad creatures who do nothing but "eat, excrete and watch TV" come first, or did Jerry (and Trisha and Oprah and the rest) create them? I think we should be told.

The music and singing are superb, though the frequency of four-letter words, even when sung as fabulously and with such feeling as here, makes this too fruity an earful for the easily offended. But believe me, this is going to be HUGE. See it here first, then watch it become a cult.