August is a month for camping, not least in London theatre. In the excellent Pirates of Penzance in Regent's Park, the police are treated as fairy-footed rozzers led by the spryly twinkling Stephen Matthews. And Pageant, a spoof American beauty contest which has just moved from the King's Head to the Vaudeville, is played by men in drag and is camper than the proverbial Chloe.
"Camp" itself is a multi-coloured word. According to my Shorter Oxford Dictionary, its origins are unknown. But we all recognise it when we see it.
Any definition of high camp would include Oscar Wilde, much of Noel Coward, the musicals of Sandy Wilson, the novels of Ronald Firbank and EF Benson, and Vincent Price's horror movies. Examples of low camp would be the Carry On movies, Round the Horne, Larry Grayson, and Frankie Howerd. Indeed, it was the last who once provided a memorable negative definition. Glancing furtively at his prim lady pianist, he gossipingly confided that she was so out of touch she thought Richard Dimbleby was camp.
What is fascinating is how camp has spread far beyond the gay community. The exchanges of Jules and Sandy on Round the Horne have become part of comic folklore. "Did you drag yourselves up on deck?" they were famously asked after a violent sea storm. To which the response was: "No, just sweaters and jeans."
Straight entertainers, for generations, have also used the armoury of camp. George Robey dolled himself up as Queen Victoria; Max Miller sported dazzling rainbow-coloured suits; Barry Humphries has transformed Melbourne's Edna Everage from a dowdy suburbanite into a glittering superstar dame with a talent to abuse.
But camp, as Pageant currently proves, has its limitations. It thrives best when its form of epicene exaggeration has a hetero counterpoint. Jules and Sandy were funny precisely because they were quizzed by Kenneth Horne, who seemed innocently oblivious to their riotous double-entendres. Kenneth Williams and Charles Hawtrey could wince and mince through the Carry On movies because they were offset by the roguish earthiness of Sid James and Barbara Windsor.
Even in a show like Regent's Park's Pirates of Penzance the campy cavortings of the cops contrast with the four-square Englishness of Paul Bradley's Major-General. Camp, at its best, is about contradiction: a classic example is George Melly, who hymns love and lust while arrayed like Solomon in all his glory.
The reason that Pageant - conceived, I'm delighted to note, by Robert Longbottom - palls after a while is that, having struck camp, it has nowhere much to go. It parodies the tacky vacuity of beauty pageants by casting men as the rival contestants. It also creates a mock-suspense by getting audience members to vote for the winning queen. On the first night the prize rightly went to Leon Maurice-Jones, who, as Miss Industrial North-East, shows an astonishing capacity to do cartwheels and play the accordion while on roller-skates.
But I suspect the show would be much funnier if it were compered by a po-faced straightman; instead it has Lionel Blair, who, with his spangled hair and salmon pink evening dress, seems in complicity with the very world outside which he supposedly stands.
Undeniably Pageant has some very funny moments: many of the best come from the toothy, horse-faced Miles Western, who plays Miss West Coast as a dippy, spaced-out creature who seems to have descended from another planet. At one point, as he seeks to demonstrate a new line in strap-on deodorants, he almost strangles himself in his choker and is reduced to suppressed sneezes by the intoxicating odours. I laughed but I was mainly intrigued by the audience, who were reduced to paralysed hysteria. There was something exaggeratingly self-perpetuating about the laughter, suggesting that camp itself is contagious.
Pageant, which is directed and co-written by Bill Russell, is a perfectly amiable off-Broadway show. But two thoughts strike me. It is the fifth American import I have seen in the past two weeks, suggesting that we are rapidly turning into a cultural colony of the US. But it also exploits to the full a strong element of camp: what Penelope Gilliatt once dubbed "the charm of the bad". While spoofing beauty contests, the show clearly delights in their tasteless decor, their absurd pretensions, their innate chauvinist competitiveness.
But to me there is limited fun to be had from wallowing in the awfulness of the second-rate: on such evenings, I find myself yearning for an unironed reality and the oxygen of authentic passion. Camp is undeniably a part of theatre, but if it becomes the whole part then you get hermetic enervation. Better, I'd have thought, the grim reality of the kitchen sink than the self-delighting mockery of sinking kitsch.
Pageant is at the Vaudeville Theatre, London WC2 (020-7836 9987), till November 26. The Pirates of Penzance is at the Regent's Park Open Air Theatre, London NW1 (020-7486 2431), from August 17 to 23, and August 29 to September 5.
