David Bowie called it “a play with my songs”. When Lazarus opened off-Broadway at the end of last year, it sold out within three hours. No wonder. It offered not only new and old numbers, but staging by the galvanic Ivo van Hove and a script by Enda Walsh, of Once. After Bowie’s death in January the show took on a shimmering poignancy. The title suggests resurrection.
Actually, it’s an extended pop video. Woozy and rapt. Long on style but short on wit. Thomas Newton, the terra-trapped alien played by Bowie in Nicolas Roeg’s 1976 movie The Man Who Fell to Earth, is given a further life, embodied by Michael C Hall. Padding boozily around in a New York apartment, fenced in by past regrets, wanting to escape, searching for a decent way to die. Hall is strong-voiced and sepulchral, but saddled with some po-faced explanations: “I’m not of this world.” He is visited by a tiny, white-haired being who wants to help: Sophia Anne Caruso sings with eldritch purity. A black-clad figure called Valentine circles malevolently, delivering the occasional massacre and a portentous statement about the ugliness of the world.
The script talks of rockets and flight but its vocabulary is pedestrian. Unexpectedly. Enda Walsh made his name with the startling Disco Pigs, a drama that floated on an entirely invented, rich language. Jan Versweyveld’s lighting and design offer flux but not dynamism. Videos wrap around the on-stage action, sometimes coinciding with it, sometimes spinning off obliquely. The rough red surface of what must be Mars looms in close-up. Caruso is seen running back and forth like Alice in Wonderland in a wind machine. As someone is beaten up on stage, the screen slowly turns blood red – to the accompaniment of “blue, blue, electric blue”. The good band is sealed – in an oddly old-fashioned manner – behind a glass screen.
The overall effect is not of movement but of trance. This welcome, temporary stage, parked outside King’s Cross like an enormous crate, deserves something less, well, stationary.
