DEAR READER: If independent journalism matters to you, please consider a $5/month membership. I report daily from inside Ukraine’s war — through blackouts, through attacks — and your support makes that possible. These dispatches will remain free to all readers. This work depends on those willing to sustain it, and I’m grateful to everyone who does. — Chris Sampson, Kyiv, June 21, 2026, Day 1579 of full scale Russian war against Ukraine.
The man who wrote The Rocky Horror Show in 1973 has spent fifty years insisting he can take no credit for what it became. I asked anyway. Mostly, I let him talk. This piece accompanies the video of our conversation.
Last week this desk ran the story of Strange Journey, Linus O’Brien’s documentary about his father, the film, and the community that grew up around it. This week, the man himself. What follows is mostly Richard, in his own words, lightly arranged and otherwise left alone.
Three weeks of fun
He still talks about the show as if its survival is a rumor he can’t quite confirm.
“It’s the sort of musical that was written in a thirteen-year-old boy’s bedroom,” he told me. “It’s not a great piece of work. It was only supposed to be three weeks’ fun, and that’s the absolute truth. We all went into it thinking we’re going to have three weeks’ fun with this — and the three weeks turned into five weeks on that original run, and then it ran for seven years in London. And meantime the film had opened and bombed, and then opened again and did the midnight screenings. And here we are fifty years later.”
The irony he savors most is where it started. The Royal Court took over its theatre in the early fifties to encourage muscular new writing with social impact — and then got Rocky.
“They didn’t like our piece. They never really have ever liked our piece, because it wasn’t what they were about. Yet it’s the only piece that’s come out of there that really actually fulfills their remit. And it embarrasses them.”
He told me about a conversation with Bob Hoskins, who had started at the Court around the same time, after Richard pointed out that Rocky had by then outrun Look Back in Anger — the cornerstone, the sacred cow.
“He looked at me and he went, ‘It’s not a very good play, is it, Richard?’ And I looked around. I thought, ‘Whoops. Are you allowed to say that out loud? I don’t think so.’”
And then, almost in passing, he handed over the thing every cast gets backwards:
“It should never be played for comedy. It should really be played as one of the most serious plays ever written. And then by default it becomes funny.”
Who is Riff Raff
I have worn the character one hundred and fifty-four times and never once asked the man who invented him: who is Riff Raff?
“Frank-N-Furter is the old queen of Transylvania, the planet — the mother of Frank-N-Furter,” he said, “and Riff Raff is in the military. He was sent down to watch over, be there — he and his sister. They were supposed to be looking out for Frank, because he was troublesome. That was their job.”
The engine of the part, he said, is resentment.
“The nice thing about the character he’s based upon is that resentment is always watchable. We like to see people driven by resentment and anger. Tim, being such a handsome chap and so good in the role — it was very easy for me, skinny and middle-aged me, to be completely resentful. He’s having a great time. I did all the work. I built the body. It was me.”
He talked about how frightening Frank-N-Furter was on stage before the film made him glamorous — ripped fishnets, track marks, blood, sticking plasters. “Quite a scary character,” he said. “And yet, for the first time, women in the audience went ‘Hello.’ They were surprised at their own attraction to this creature. It was an interesting moment of time.”
The misfits’ hour
Part of why he wrote it, it turns out, is that television used to go to bed.
“Television in those days used to shut down at midnight,” he said. “And they knew that the only people watching it after ten, eleven at night were going to be insomniacs, drunks, and people like myself. And so those sort of movies went on.”
The wonderful misfits, I offered.
He has never claimed the meaning the world has hung on the show. “All I was doing was writing a silly comedy,” he said. “I didn’t see it as subversive. I just thought I was writing a comedy. And that was it, really. So it’s astonishing, and it still completely amazes me.”
The world weeps for America
He did not need prompting to turn to the United States.
“The world weeps for America at the moment,” he said — and then he described its president as one of the most disgusting human beings ever to draw breath, openly so, on a daily basis. “You’ve abandoned rationality. I don’t know how you’ve done it, but America’s abandoned rationality, and you’ve let this monster loose, with all those dreadful enablers. It’s sickening, isn’t it? Absolutely sickening.”
When I raised the way Russia has turned hostility toward gay and trans people into an export — the whole machinery of Kremlin “traditional values” — he called it fascinating and went somewhere larger, into Abraham, into magic versus evidence, into what he framed as a reckoning the species keeps postponing.
“We deserve better,” he said. “We’re a sentient species. Given the gift of thought — and we, three-quarters of the population of sentient beings, would prefer magic to rationality. It’s tragic.”
He returned to it later, talking about the backlash when his statue went up in Hamilton, New Zealand — the warnings that children passing it might somehow be turned gay.
“What the hell’s wrong with you people?” he said. It was never the laser gun anyone objected to, I said — it was the fishnets. He agreed. It is worth noticing, I told him, what frightens people versus what should: nothing done about the mass shootings, everything done to stop the fishnets and get the Bible back into the schoolroom.
A thumbs-up from me
Theatre is alive here in Kyiv in a way it simply isn’t where I’m from — people making film, singing, staging musicals under a war, soldiers home from the front with prosthetic limbs getting up on a stage to act. I told Richard as much, and floated the thing I’d barely let myself say: a live production of The Rocky Horror Show, here, in wartime.
He didn’t hesitate.
“I can put you in touch with who you’d need to talk to,” he said — the people who hold the rights, the Rocky Horror Company. “I would have thought we’d be happy to come on board and allow this to happen in a war-torn country. I suppose it’s a thumbs-up from me.”
His own reading of Riff Raff, the one who finally comes through the door to end the master’s mission, is less heroic than mine. “I saw Riff Raff as a party-pooper,” he said. “He didn’t like other people having fun, did he?”
Steal, but improve
I asked what he’d tell young people still working out how to be who they are, in a narrowing time. His answer was pure craft.
“Nothing comes out of a vacuum,” he said. “Don’t be afraid to steal — plagiarize — from everywhere. But if you do, you have to improve upon what you’re stealing. Use it as a tool. There’s no art without craft.”
He writes now, he said, for himself and his grandchildren — cautionary tales, nobody looking over his shoulder.
“My only job is to make the next line as good as the one before. I can spend a week on four lines, and I’ve got no one pushing me, and I can have so much pleasure just playing with four lines for a week.” When a good couplet finally lands, he said, “I want to rush out on the street and stop people and tell them I just came up with a great couplet.”
He doesn’t own a phone. “Isn’t that marvelous?” What worries him is the loss of the shared room — cinemas emptier than they were, neighborhoods that have stopped being neighborhoods, everyone home alone next to each other with AI pressing in at the edges. Rocky, he said, is one of the last things people still do together, in a room, as a party. “We need more of that. Otherwise we’re all becoming very insular.”
There is a story he tells on himself. He was in Singapore, talking to a stranger, and said he’d never really tried to become rich or famous — it just wasn’t where he came from.
“And he turned around to me and said, ‘What went wrong?’”
Chris Sampson is a journalist based in Kyiv since January 2022, and once upon a time played RiffRaff 154 times before hanging up the cloak and moving on.
