Lazarus is coming

“I started getting into the idea of writing a kind of a non-narrative that just had situations within it and the audience kind of joins up the dots in their own way, in the way they want to make it. They remake the material they’re offered.” – This quote, from The Last Five Years (a wonderful documentary, well worth catching up on) may have come from the 70s, but boy does it apply to Lazarus.

There’s divisive, there’s confusing, and then there’s Lazarus. This is a curate’s egg covered in marmite – a divisive show about which I feel divided. I love being baffled by a work of art. It’s why I loved Misterman and Ballyturk, which were like Rorschach tests when discussing them with family afterwards. It’s why I truly believe that the disjointed stories and zig-zag perspective of Ziggy Stardust is one of the great narratives of the twentieth century. It’s why I’m fascinated by The Man Who Fell To Earth – I’ve seen that film twice, and where it confused me so much the first time around, it confused me much more the second, but revealed itself as a deliberately debilitating piece of work, the most alienating study of alienation imaginable. What links Walsh and Roeg as directors, though, is that I get the impression that they absolutely understand their story – its central simple meaning – and afterwards deliberately confound, confuse, control the mystery. With Lazarus, I didn’t feel that; or I only felt it in parts. I really don’t think there was that purity of vision or narrative control, which gave us the opportunity to interpret what we interpret.  Instead I felt there was confusion.  It's a fine difference, but a vital one.

I think that, at its heart, there’s a great musical in here. It’s between a three and five hander. It’s Newton, the girl, Mary Lou, and maybe Mary Lou’s husband and maybe Valentine. But it's swamped by so much. There are Bowie songs for the sake of it.  There's an alien who sold his business, but we're told he's a man and it's the earth wot he sold.  There are young dudes just to sing that one song about all of them carrying the news.  There seems to be a character called Valentine because this is a great song (correct me if I'm wrong, but Valentine was Newton’s ex-lover’s reincarnation’s boyfriend’s friend’s murderer, yes?).  If it's true that Bowie gave Walsh a list of well over a hundred songs, then either Bowie was writing about the same character for his entire career (before he even played the role, in which case why not make more of this autobiographical link?), or Bowie wasn't picky enough and pruning needed to be done (also, weird though it is to say, Bowie is SUCH a great songwriter that when a song as iconic as "Changes" comes on, it's so iconic it overtakes the show itself, and without strong enough context we're in Mamma Mia territory). There seemed to be digressions for the sake of digressions; there seemed to be a lot of stuff jumbled up, and why? Too much of it just can’t be unwrapped, and whereas part of the fun of, say, Ballyturk was trying to unwrap it and successfully coming up with interpretations, I think too much of Lazarus is either knotted so tightly that it takes a genius of Bowie’s scale to untie; or between the three main creative voices something’s gotten muddled and the show at King’s Cross is just a bit of a muddle.  In a nutshell, I think it’s telling how many people here have simply said “No idea what happened, but I enjoyed it” (or “Hated it, no idea what happened”). There are one or two themes about which we’re all in agreement – and unsurprisingly, it’s in dealing with these themes that the show shines – but rather than take the time to fight our case, to say what we saw in it and why we saw it, we just throw up our hands and give up, saying instead "it’s just bloody confusing, isn’t it?". And I think that’s something of a failing, because I really didn’t feel that amidst the confusion there really was some clear vision, some clear statement – I think that three wonderful creatives laid out three sets of dots, and if we try and match them to anything more complex than its one central idea (more on which later), we just get a muddle.

And sadly, I don’t think van Hove was the right director for this – I just don't think he's able to deal with whatever Walsh's script means, or whatever Bowie's legacy is. There’s no wit to its obtuseness, it just feels obtuse. Versweyveld’s design, meanwhile, doesn’t have the originality or oomph that this needs. It seems recycled from Song from Far Away, which is an issue.  Stylistically, too, there’s nothing original or unnerving about watching overlapping dialogues or simultaneous time-zones in theatre which there is in the movies, and was in Roeg's movie. Where in cinema these cubist time-frames are unusual (and thus Roeg’s barmy timeline makes for disconcerting viewing), we see overlapping times all the time in theatre, which feels too run-of-the-mill here for such a non-run-of-the-mill script. The theatre itself is too big, and Newton’s claustrophobia is lost on us. Where Walsh and Bowie wrote a sequel to The Man Who Fell To Earth, in this set it felt like van Hove was directing a sequel to Song from Far Away, but without that show’s central loneliness. Perhaps this would have worked on film (and had it been on film, not only could it have preserved Roeg’s weird narrative mood, but filmed in 2015 could have offered this actor continuing this performance in this style). On the stage, though, it’s a surprisingly flat-footed production. I’ve always thought Walsh is a wonderful director in his own right, and seeing van Hove do this, I wished we had this one central (sound and) vision guiding us forwards – and under Walsh maybe it would have felt more in control, if no less unclear.

So that’s my predominant and overriding issue. I can’t tell you what this is about. That’s fine.  But I can't interpret it, and tell you what I think it’s about.  That's not fine.  That seems to be the general opinion too. So rather than perplex us all into thinking different things, it perplexes us into giving up. Confusing is good, baffling better – but there’s a line between opaque and just muddy. There’s a difference between joining the dots, and joining random dots. There’s a difference between a Rorschach test and a dirty blobby piece of paper. This fell between these extremes.

And yet, I can’t tell you how I interpreted this, but I can tell you how this made me feel. And I can't tell you just how moving I found it. Strip all the baffling bits back and get to its heart, and what you have is Thomas Newton – and what a central character he is. There’s one caveat, which is that I don’t think anyone involved quite resolved whether Newton was just singing Bowie songs (it’s a new musical), was a tribute to Bowie (as I felt the "Where Are We Now" scene was, wonderfully too) or WAS Bowie (too many specific references, too many iconic songs) – but when the rest was stripped away, we had a character and his companions face death – and even without the metatextual awareness of Bowie’s life, it’s this that makes this so moving, and this emotion that makes this, ultimately, a confusing mess but a profound success.

It’s not just that Michael C Hall is tremendous in the role, strong to mask vulnerability and compelling in both stillness and song. It’s that the Bowie songs he’s given – especially the new ones – are songs which genuinely propel the character forwards. As a fan of the film, I found the Newton/Mary Lou relationship very touching. Given that his selfishness and addiction ruined the first Mary Lou, to watch him do the same – helplessly, guiltily – to a second Mary Lou brings things full-circle in an all too human way, and Elly/Mary Lou's ‘Always Crashing’ was such a good way of articulating this. It’s a brief aside, but it worked so well. I didn’t think her character had the identity or the complexity of Candy Clark in the movie and I think that was an issue, but I thought the way the Newton/Mary Lou relationship was drawn a second time was wonderfully done (going by the cast recording, I prefer Amy Lennox to Christin Miloti).

It’s also that his central issue is beautifully told. The only thing I do think this was about is death – perhaps Bowie’s own, perhaps not, but either way definitely it's about being resolute for it. This has a beautifully honest and indeed hopeful attitude towards death – one which takes the logic that a good death is simply what follows a good life, however difficult that may be to both prove and to accept. In Hall and Caruso’s friendship and Hall and Lennox’s forgiveness, this managed to shine through whatever else was happening on stage. Now, it is inescapable that something happened on the day he died, and this IS about Bowie’s own death and acceptance towards. But even ignoring this, to me it had a notion that dying is harder than death, but to go through the cathartic difficulties of accepting past mistakes, reliving past relationships, forgiving past discretions and living well is what makes a good death; to be awake to a good life matters more than, in this sleep of death, what moonage daydreams may come. It’s touching, important, and wonderfully told.

And what most affected me was this friendship. This had one of the best depictions of platonic love I’ve ever seen on stage. Sophie Ann Caruso (who very capably handled a technical fault when I saw it) more than matches Hall, with a mysterious maturity that’s compelling to watch and brings out the inner best in others. Quite what their relationship is I don’t know (father-daughter seems too obvious for this obtuse world, yet it very may be very simply that), but whatever it is, it’s such a pure and true and wonderful portrayal of platonic love, of simple perfect equal friendship. It’s telling that whilst other iconic songs felt like tagged-on tributes, "Heroes" didn’t – in the interplay between Newton and her, there was playfulness and happiness, which led into the ending with unbearable poignancy. Bowie’s final statement being about accepting death is haunting enough, but through Hall and Caruso, through Newton and her, it becomes about accepting death through living well and living together; and however I felt about Valentine or "Valentine’s Day" or van Hove, I found this message - these moments - so extremely affecting. It’s got narrative muddle, but such emotional weight.

So I had fairly hefty reservations which meant I couldn’t give my heart to it in a way I could give my heart to Song from Far Away or Ballyturk or Blackstar – and ultimately that’s just down to too many cooks, three incredibly strong narrators all pulling in their own directions (Walsh enigmatically, Bowie profoundly, van Hove unsuccessfully). I like being confused, but I don’t like watching other people be confused, and this had too much of that. And infuriatingly, there's a briefer, tauter, perhaps cinematic version of this which is no less clear, but far more in control.  But when the stars aligned... When Walsh took the characters to just the right point, and Bowie’s sound and vision gave them just the right emotional escape... Always Crashing... Where Are We Now... Heroes... It’s less good than the movie, but it’s infinitely more moving, and for that, for all its faults, I find myself a fan. I'd give it four stars, because it overcomes its many faults through one genius writing stunning new songs, and one genius writing a baggy but beguiling script, and the end result's emotional impact being so affecting. Those moments, those songs, had so much to say about the difficult necessity of dying well but living well beforehand, justified the muddle around them. Yes, I would have rather had a director who I felt captured the confusing mood with greater claustrophobia, or a script with fewer digressions and greater emphasis on its central character, and fewer jukebox-musical-esque numbers – and it would have been stronger for it. But this had moment after moment where Newton and her dealt so movingly with this biggest of all themes, and song after song after song which illuminated this beautifully, hauntingly, profoundly – and one is all you need to make it work; as a great man once said, ain’t there one damn song that can make me break down and cry?