Despite her global acclaim, Billie Trix – a fictional pop icon in the tradition of the Rutles and Spinal Tap – might have been forgotten, had she not been championed by actor Frances Barber and rehabilitated by Pet Shop Boys.
Six Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe songs grace this one-woman celebration, including Friendly Fire, a piano ballad from their 2001 musical Closer to Heaven, which first introduced Trix to the world. The other songs, four of them new, range from Latin shuffle and 60s pop to full-on disco, and are as catchy and insistent as you’d expect.
The show suggests you can tell a lot about a person by when they discovered Billie Trix. There are the early adopters: those folk-loving peaceniks who picked up on her first single, Cover Me in Calamine, just as she was hitting New York from a rubble-strewn Berlin with an unknown Nico for company. Soon she would give soup-tin inspiration to Andy Warhol.
The cinema lovers will tell you they became fans as soon as they saw The Masturbation of Race, which drew in a further legion of high-art admirers when it was adapted as an oratorio. If you’re a theatregoer, it was probably her “incomprehensible” Mother Courage that got you hooked.
Trix has a Zelig-like gift for being in the right place at the right time. As she says herself, she’s a “zeitgeist for sore eyes” and, just as she captured the disco market with the Sister Sledge-like pulse of Ich Bin Music, so she caught the eye of the YBA scene when she hung out with Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin in the 90s. She has been courted by everyone from Dalí to Trump, and no less a figure than Jean-Paul Sartre called her pretentious.
Scripted by Jonathan Harvey, the performance shows how qualities that in others would come across as arrogance, conceit and Germanic froideur, in Trix seem entirely justified. Time and again, she has proved the naysayers wrong and has had the power not only to reinvent herself, but to bring peace where there is conflict. We laugh – a lot – in support of her resilience.
In any case, who could remain sceptical when the star sings such evergreen hits as Little Can of Soup (for Warhol) and Run Girl Run (for Vietnam) with all the smoky grit of a survivor?
• At Assembly Rooms, Edinburgh, until 24 August. Then at Leicester Square theatre, London, 3–7 September.
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