The Sunday Telegraph
Sunday 10th February 2002
MUSIC
Malcolm Hayes

It's confession time. Yes, I admit to having watched that phenomenon of trash television, The Jerry Springer Show. It was (quite) a long time ago and it only happened (just about) once. Truly nothing in life is wasted, however, because the experience turned out to have been useful advance homework on Jerry Springer: The Opera at Battersea Arts Centre, composed by Richard Thomas and co-written and directed by Stewart Lee. They have asked me to make it clear that this is still a work-in-progress, and therefore officially at preview stage only. It's a riot in any case, and in the best sense.

Come off it: it isn't opera at all, despite some delicious operatic take-offs in Thomas's piano accompanied score. This is a musical, with the chorus representing the studio audience of Springer's show - denouncing the benighted participating couples who harangue each other in scenes of mutual emotional carnage, while Springer hosts proceedings with laconic mock-empathy ("I'm confused here"), and a marvellously morose bouncer tries to stop the cat-fights from progressing towards mutual disembowelment.

The whole thing is seriously offensive, genuinely as funny as it thinks it is, replete with ceaseless profanities, laced with moments of poignancy, and dangerously close to brilliant in its sheer verve. Thomas's scintillating score succeeds in applying Sondheim's ingenuity and dark imagination to a musical idiom resembling Donald Swann on crack cocaine. There will be pressure to sanitise the final version for the show to have a chance of making it to the West End or elsewhere. I hope Thomas and Lee successfully resist.