LAZARUS
A Last Dance
A Review of David Bowie’s last ‘fall to earth’ - LAZARUS 2017
Mar 2, 2017
LAZARUS played to critical, and occasionally bemused acclaim in both New York and London. Its enthralling ambiguity leaves its resonances of ethereal mystique and edgy surrealist realism in the minds of the audiences and Bowie fans long after the stage lights have dimmed and the actors have left.
Despite its billing as a Musical, I cannot think of LAZARUS in such a ‘confining’ construct. Its structural and musical affiliation to the ballad opera form, warrants different consideration, not least also, because of its reference to the Germanic SINGSPIEL tradition, of which Kurt Weil’s caustic, disobediently raunchy Die Dreigroschenoper, (The Threepenny Opera) draws its signature identity, and which Weil himself described as a ‘scenic cantata’. Bowie’s own musical relationship with the texts and music and Brecht /Weil may not be hugely well-known; it was real and very intimate . . .
From The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny to his appearance in BAAL
And even his incarnation as Threepenny Clown in Lindsay Kemp’s
Pierrot in Turquoise in 1967. As a man with more than a passing penchant for myth and symbolism, the possible reverential nod to Mack the Knife, in his own witful taking of the name Bowie, would not surprise me; I can see such self reflective irreverence being right up his alley.
This hidden complexity in the fabric of LAZARUS to me, deserves attention. As with most works of art imbued with an enormity of purpose and depths of labyrinthian meaning, LAZARUS is a prism: A distilling construct refracting and reflecting the lateral thinking architectural dimensionality of an intellect of immense alacrity and deeply spiritual acuity. It is an encompassing song-drama of inferences, references, quotations and inventions shaping a kaleidoscopic interior landscape, which while informed by biography, never seeks or asks to be pinned down under that autobiographical glass.
Watching LAZARUS in King’s Cross (significant not only for being David Bowie’s hometown), it was clear that the heart of the work lies in its invisible playbook; an inner lining embodying his entire oeuvre. It is not just a matter of a ‘jukebox context’ drawing on an assemblage of known and new songs, nor just about the thousand veils disguising an intimate morality tale.
If one cares to step inside and beyond the visual theatrical incarnation that is effusive and elusive, bold and distracted, pedestrian and stellar, it is here that one will find a finely tuned, iconographically crafted artistic universe, a work distilled of his unique intellectual and emotional refinement into a richly layered staging of subtext that leaves the viewer immersed in an inescapable moment of stellar evanescence and the psyche holding onto its intoxicating elixir.
As the lights come on, men and women stand clapping in an openly tearful ovation, even when most are mystified by the evening’s experience.
David Jones was a consummate storyteller in performance art, not just David Bowie the performance artist. His narrative is complex, complicit, intelligent, raw, indifferent to sentimentality and ruthlessly faithful to itself. Against the glum proscenium of global 20th Century economic-political totalitarian kitsch, his dissidence was spellbinding. This is not to imply it was universally liked.
Regardless of his incarnations, his presence was and remains an abiding abstraction, ‘holographic in nature’ such, that over a career of fifty odd years, it was naturally and intentionally illusory, and not only for the ‘sheer halo effect’: While characterisation mattered, it was about the work, not so much the man. And yet, as Endo Walsh says of his collaboration in writing this work, … “No matter how the play comes out, you always end up talking about yourself.”
In its staging, LAZARUS embraces our inarticulate search for Meaning with a stripping down to where Ambiguity is as concrete as Presence by absence, and addiction by Abstinence. This is so pervasive I felt it to be almost Pirandello-esque in its search of its own theatricality: No negative inference here to the performances themselves, quite the opposite; more a comment on the innate forceful nature of delusion, as a state of mind, and how Bowie-Walsh/Van Howe, utilise the artifice to suggest even an alien is potentially never alien enough, to get his own ‘trite shite’ sorted, differently to us mere mortals. It does not shy away from how that renders us impotent in the dire pedestrian framework of such a quest, so much so, sequestering ‘otherness’ on one hand becomes a deviance of desire and on the other, a hallmark of alienation and destruction.
LAZARUS is a sensorial critique designed of architectural abstraction, yet very discreetly dressed as a personalised, public homily, to the spirituality of Judaic humanism.
It is a morality play; a glam-rock reckoning, one in which, however, there no realistic religious second-coming. No one to rescue even the most alien of ourselves, if not a return to existential kindness that feels more like no country for old men, than the 2nd Avenue of once upon a time, burgeoning with Yiddish theatres and an embracing cultural dignity. It seems no accident that 2nd Avenue remains out view, if not us having lost sight of its humanist purview.
LAZARUS, a contemporary ‘song-drama’ is a lament and a cautionary tale about our lost humanism; the ease with which we have surrendered dignity and the caustic decay that brings to both the societal as well as our personalised human fabric. It alludes to an older world of hardship with an equivalence that at least held onto values underpinning an intrinsic beauty of the exiled and immigrant, and all those stories had to say about living-death and actual dying amidst the fervour of the living.
It is not coincidental at this point in our time, LAZARUS incarnates the spirit of Emma Lazarus, the well-heeled Jewish poet, whose life’s work reflected in words, embodying the tradition of Judaic humanism, welcomes the wretchedly abandoned of the world, engraved at the base of The Statue of Liberty:
It is no co-incidence either that in this staged rendering, she never quite finds her footing in a Elly’s (her name meaning light) belief in being her incarnation; or that The New Collossus is included in The Complete Book and Lyrics.
Throughout the play, the ghost of Emma Lazarus whispers the deepest irony in this profound kind of theatrical air; so steeped with the same street grit that rang through Lotte Lenya’s Mack the Knife and the wretched melancholy of Surabaya Johnny. Alongside her, there is Valentine who takes me into the violent abandon of Clockwork Orange and Happy End; that other kind of America sung in the contemporary setting of its contemporary culture, of youthful mass murder.
Like Isaac Newton’s own explorative experimentation of light and colour, Bowie’s music and lyrics offer their own prisms dispersing his artistry into its essential spectral beams leading us down his yellow brick road and somewhere beyond in that unique, existential rainbow. It is no wonder then Bowie looked to Enda Walsh, whose own plays brim with covert iconographic references alluding to far more than the obvious, to write its story.
As a writer, I am fascinated by the high romanticism of lyrics in LAZARUS functioning both as melodic exponent of the drama, and as script; not in the conventional artifice of propelling action or even defining characters, but shaping its interior psyche. It is said that David Bowie described LAZARUS as a play with his songs. This typically self-effacing deflection serves to render neutral ground in which the viewer/ listener/audience defines for themselves what it is they are experiencing, and yet, it doesn’t take long to understand the nature of this masking: the work needs to speak for itself without interference by the author. This precept, even if ignoring its artistic implication regarding authorship and identity, can have me write off-tangent on the broader philosophical scope at length, that this risks turning into a book. The songs are not a musical complement to the dramatic text or action. It is not just about the choice of song; it is how each speaks from within the script as the lyrical extension of the play’s mindscape. To quote Enda Walsh of this process:
“And then there were the songs.
David handed me a folder of lyrics and CDs he had put together. ‘Some of these you’ll know’. It was a bloody funny thing to say. We would hammer out the story together, but initially he wanted me to choose the songs we would use. I guess he had lived with some of them for years and there must have been unshakable associations — maybe it would be easier for me to listen to them coldly from a purely narrative perspective.
His lyrics often arrive cut-up and opaque — so it was rarely about listening to the words and sticking it into the story. It was about the emotion, the rhythm and atmosphere of those songs — and having the characters riding that wave and accessing their souls, where they could lyrically go to those strange places.
We talked about form — the shape if the story arriving broken and a little shattered. We talked about a person dying and the moments before their death and what might happen in their mind and how that would be constructed onstage. We started out talking about escape, but we ended up talking about a person trying to find rest. About dying in an easier way. “
Bowie’s musical tapestry feeds Walsh’s arcane script and the dance of mutual reverence between lyricist and playwright renders the deeper conversation less like a game of chess and more like the masked secrecy of Kabuki theatre.
The unravelling of that theatrical secrecy comes later, much later: after the torrential downpour that left the mind and psyche drenched; when the biting drops of rain settle, and all that wet gathers into the swell of interior ground water, distilling with each recounting, new and ever new revelations of itself, not unlike the Kabbalist Book of Splendour.
Reading through the play’s complete book and lyrics, reveals the extent to which music defined its presence in LAZARUS as its own persona, holding its own mark downstage emerging and receding, engaging and distancing itself from both the temporal and corporeal, just as we do. It lives and breathes its own anima.
The music, unsurprisingly perhaps, partners with Time. which too, takes centre-stage, distinct from space or body. It evaporates. From the newest specially written material for the production to the older beloved anthem that wasn’t one this time around, Time vanished into the future of the Now, — and for the duration, the music came back to us from our future incisively prescient.
Throughout the play and the lyrics, it is the text, embedded Jungian symbolism and commentary that delves beneath the skin into the subconscious and bevels at our egotistical deterioration. It leaves us in front of that mirror, or in that haze of alcoholic stupor, wishing likewise to put to bed our deeper demons; each of us, by turn, that alien seeking our way home, yet stranded behind walls housing violence or abandonment, of our making.
Alternatively, perhaps it may obliquely infer Earth isn’t a recommendable interstellar destination, if the ‘man-martian’ who fell to earth ends up a drunken recluse holed up in his room, unable to change a thing: All the future seems to hold of its promise of change, is violence, or war. Clearly then, Thomas Jerome Newton is no Colossus of Maroussi. He is not a natural traveller, even less an accidental tourist, albeit an interstellar one.
In The Man Who Fell to Earth, Bryce holds Newton and “feeling the light body trembling in his hands like the body of a delicate bird”, offers anyone who has lived with addiction that moment of recognition, of humanity.
Michael C Hall’s embodiment of Bowie’s disintegrating Thomas Jerome Newton begs his own moment of such tender dignity.
and finds it with the girl who holds his own trembling desperation in her promise of his future;
freedom, in her hand drawn outline of his rocket on the floor.
This childlike gesture in all its innocent dignity, brims with heart-wrenching simplicity and voyeurs that we are, we’re as exposed to its essential reality. Just as we cannot escape ourselves, we are equally trapped here on earth, and here, in life.
Even Newton fails his most organic scale of natural significance: he renders himself an immovable force in the inescapable pathos of a drawn, vectorless spaceship incapable of acceleration, however it might salvage his homeless soul. Of what value then an alien of singular scalar dimensionality; a body mass with no direction, when we so badly aspire to his stellar ‘otherworldliness’?
What this might say of our own capacity for self-delusion and for our compelling immobile attachment to life, even in the inevitability of encroaching mortality? If you are daring enough to go where others fear to tread: Not even hallucinogens and a sea of milk can get you out of life, alive.
Through it all, what we seek, is to be acknowledged, and held close and for Time to stop; and in that kindness, it is the humanist light of dignity, even if only among strangers, that makes of us kings and queens, and heroes, always, even if just for one day.
LAZARUS is more than a musical. It is Starman ’s last dance and it’s one to suggest that we take a good hard look at our own.
The iconic legacy of David Jones-Bowie lies in his liminal grace and its humanist eloquence, imbued in the everything, and nothing, of LAZARUS. The deeper I delve into the peeling layers of the artistry of David Jones, the more appreciative I am of the Bowie knife-edge upon which its gossamer delicacy thrives, not unlike life itself.
Published first on Medium on March 2nd 2017. My gratitude then and thanks to Home | The Corner Shop PR
The Corner Shop is one of the UK’s leading PR companies for the arts, specialising in theatre, ballet and opera. thecornershoppr.com
THE CORNER SHOP Public Relations for the London production of LAZARUS, for permissions granted and access to official Lazarus production images and material.