THEATRE: Jackie Onassis’ Flying Circus

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Nick Smurthwaite

LONDON, Sep 29 1998 (IPS) - One of the century’s most glamorous women, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, is the subject of a wild and irreverent comedy show, opening in the West End next week (Oct 12).

Just four years after her death from cancer, Jackie Onassis has re-emerged as a figure of fun in Gip Hoppe’s “Jackie”, which recently finished a six-month run on Broadway.

“Yes, you could say it’s a freak show, but it doesn’t make a freak out of Jackie,” declares the Hoppe (pronounced Hopple), whose track record as a stage writer includes adaptations of The Hunchback of Notre Dame and The Fall of The House Of Usher.

New York’s theatre critics reacted favourably to Hoppe’s provocative satire, one describing it as “a satirical riot,” while another drew comparisons with the outrageous TV show “Monty Python’s Flying Circus.’ This probably referred to a scene in which a toga-clad Jackie rides off in a chariot to the accompaniment of a Greek chorus mocking the late President Kennedy’s rhetorical style of speech making.

Quite apart from any matters of good taste, surprisingly, the notoriously protective Kennedy clan remained silent during the show’s New York run.

“There’s been no feedback from the Kennedy’s at all. I’m sure they have better things to do than worry about a fairly inconsequential piece of theatre. It’s not vicious, it lust invites the audience to have some fun. It is celebratory,” Hoppe said. So what was it that prompted him to pick on “Jackie O” in the first place? Did he feel she was ripe for reappraisal, having been treated with such reverence since her death in 1994?

“No, it was an arbitrary choice really because I felt that stage biographies had lapsed into this rut of po-faced one-person shows. I wanted to do a big show that encompassed someone’s entire life without being all serious and sanctimonious about it,” he said. “I hardly knew anything about her when I started out. I read everything I could get my hands on, about twenty-five books. She once said, ‘My life feels like a cartoon in which I don’t even recognise myself,’ so I’m afraid I took that at face value.”

Jacqueline Bouvier’s incredible journey from her marriage to John F. Kennedy and then being America’s First Lady at 31 – “my only aim is to look after Jack’s comfort” – through her second marriage to Greek tycoon Aristotle Onassis to the free-wheeling New York bachelor girl of her final years is rich in drama and contradiction.

During the so-called Camelot years, while appearing to be President Kennedy’s pretty, smiling consort, Jackie knew all about his compulsive philandering and suffered a good deal because of it.

“They romp around like a bunch of baboons on the loose,” she once complained to her sister about the Kennedy clan’s sexual abandon.

Not only was Jackie expected to turn a blind eye to her husband’s peccadilloes, but also this educated and opinionated woman had to play along with the world’s simplistic view of her. For what riveted the world’s media far more than Kennedy’s performance as President was Jackie’s latest outfit.

A couple of decades later, Princess Diana performed exactly the same distracting role in the life of the Prince of Wales. There are many parallels between Jackie and Diana. Both came from extremely wealthy, yet emotionally shaky, backgrounds. Both were forced to suffer their husband’s contemptible behaviour, and both eventually cut loose from a stifling male influence.

By a strange quirk of fate, a comedy tracing the disastrous marriage of Prince Charles and Diana, “Love Upon The Throne,” also is to play in London’s West End. Like Jackie, it is more interested in raising laughs than sticking to the facts – although its creator, Patrick Barlow, insists that it is not disrespectful to Diana’s memory.

Whatever his critics may say to the contrary, Gip Hoppe also believes he has paid a kind of homage to Jackie. “The more I read about her, the more I admired her. She lived her whole life in the public eye, her privacy constantly invaded; yet she never be came bitter. One of the quotes I use in the show is ‘I went through difficult times and kept my sanity’. That’s no small accomplishment”.

At the end of the day, Hoppe isn’t making any false claims for his show. “I only know what I’ve read about her, it’s other people’s opinions of her, and nobody should imagine this is what she was really like. Only Jackie knew that. There is only a certain amount you can do when you have eight actors playing over 150 parts.

“What we’ve done is take all this stuff about Jackie, throw it up in the air and see where it lands. We’re using history as a trampoline to jump on and have a bit of fun.”