![]() It turned out that Ivo was a passionate fan of David’s. I left the theatre and rang David to say he’d be perfect. I saw his A View from the Bridge at the Young Vic and was blown away. I’d been talking to Ivo van Hove about something entirely different. He read them all and about three months later I got an email from him saying: Enda’s the man. David said he’d read Enda’s work – and were there other ideas? I gave him lots of other ideas for writers. I wanted a writer who was free-flowing and anarchic. I also felt that Enda’s energy and off-centredness would be a really good match with David. That felt very appropriate for the character: he wants to leave the planet and get home but he can’t. You proposed that Enda Walsh write Lazarus – what made you suggest him? The first person to come to my mind was Enda because he is brilliant at writing about people who are trapped. He was obsessed by the character and took an option out on the novel of The Man Who Fell to Earth a long time before he came to me with the idea of turning it into a musical.ĭavid Bowie in a scene from The Man Who Fell to Earth, 1976. The character’s isolation and fame are probably an aspect of it and he probably identified with the fact that Newton was a huge drinker – David had been in his time and then got clean and sober. What was it about Newton that inspired him? The character must have had a big effect on him to want to make a musical based on him all that time afterwards. ![]() Lazarus continues the story of Thomas Newton, who Bowie played in the 1976 film The Man Who Fell to Earth. With the wave of lockdown streaming – something David would have been up for and interested in – it felt like the right time. Rather than just bang it out at the time, I talked with David’s management and we felt the right thing to do would be to wait until five years had passed since his death. When we saw the finished article it turned out to be very powerful, quite a different experience. Was the film ever intended to be shown publicly? Initially it was for archive but we did it with seven or eight cameras like they do NT Live. And Anna Cordingley’s costumes delight, with iOTA’s Valentine initially dressed as the Thin White Duke before emerging in the clown couture from the Scary Monsters period.Lazarus was recorded during its run at King’s Cross theatre in London. The performers are uniformly admirable - Panaretos in particular - each replicating Bowie’s exerted gasp-squeak on the howled high notes. They give immediacy to classic singles, as well as deeper cuts and a few newies written by Bowie specifically for this story. An elevated live band sits behind, in full view of the auditorium. It reflects the actors, and creates the illusion of doubles behind it too, allowing the performers to appear both within and without, befitting the tale. In director Michael Kantor’s production, a wall of video screens bisects the stage. It’s all technically impressive, as you’d expect. Instead, the Bowie-brand surrealism falls flat, while the mildly cheesy revue of his deathless music delivers the emotional punch. If only the oblique nature of the narrative inspired a cathartic response. This was never gonna be Mamma Mia.īeard-stroking experimental theatre and jukebox musicals are strange bedfellows, even for Bowie, the strangest of all bedfellows. Playwright Enda Walsh, who wrote the book for Lazarus with Bowie, made a name for himself with the theatre piece Disco Pigs, which came with its own invented language. If you come out feeling light-headed, you’re not alone. ‘If you come out feeling light-headed, you’re not alone.’ Photograph: Jeff Busby ![]() Oh, and they sing Bowie songs all the time. Meanwhile, Newtown’s housekeeper, Elly (Phoebe Panaretos) undergoes a crisis of identity - and perhaps a mild case of spiritual possession - while his mirror identity Valentine (iOTA, AKA Mad Max: Fury Road’s Doof Warrior) goes on a murder spree. In what is either a rescue mission from space, evidence of creeping insanity, or, y’know, something really out of left-field, a mysterious, pallid girl (Emily Milledge) appears to him. Here, Chris Ryan takes on Bowie’s role from the original movie: Newton, an apparently immortal extraterrestrial who has given up on his efforts to escape Earth, waiting, hopelessly, to die in his apartment. The plot is nearly impossible to describe a sequel, of sorts, to the novel The Man Who Fell to Earth, which director Nicolas Roeg adapted in the 1970s with Bowie in the lead. But, being a David Bowie concoction, it always zigs when you think it’ll zag. Much like Bowie’s last album Blackstar, which was widely read as a “farewell” from a terminally ill man, Lazarus seeks to articulate and animate the experience of bodily expiry.
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