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Theater

September 1996

The imposture of Martin Guerre

by Mark Steyn

“I’d like people to leave the theater,” said West End producer Michael White, “wanting to have sex with whomever or whatever.” Now that New York has given us “the Hair of the Nineties” in Rent, it was inevitable that sooner or later “the Oh, Calcutta! of the Nineties” would show up. White produced both Oh, Calcutta! and the Johnny-come-lately Voyeurz and, after Voyeurz (at the Whitehall Theatre) opened to predictably dismal reviews, he pulled out his Oh, Cal cuttings to demonstrate they’d been wrong then and were therefore wrong now. “The Daily Mail described it as a big yawn. The Sketch said it was dismal,” he recalled. “Only Harold Hobson, in The Sunday Times, broke from the pack, saying it was a classic example of the British inability to deal with sex. It’s exactly the same kind of language today, and Hobson is ...

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Mark Steyn’s most recent book is America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It (Regnery)
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This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 15 September 1996, on page 98
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