It was not God's truth before I met you
David Bowie's dream comes true. But maybe that truth is a dream
David Bowie knew he had cancer. But he did not know it would kill him.
It is difficult to divorce his last works from his death. But it is important to see the distance between them. When he was creating this piece of theatre called Lazarus, he was unaware that his last public appearance would be at its premiere.
He had been singing about death for decades. He had already come close to dying. His diagnosis of cancer came in 2014; perhaps, at some level, he understood it would be different this time. But he spoke as if he had a future; and it is worth trying to see Lazarus as a work not by a man who was dying, but by a man who was living.
Right from the start, he had wanted to make a musical.
He wrote a rock opera in 1968 entitled Ernie Johnson. It was set at a party thrown by Ernie to celebrate his imminent suicide. Nothing came of this.
He planned in 1974 to stage a musical based on George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Nothing came of that, either, bar a handful of songs.
He planned in the 1990s to stage a theatre piece based on his 1995 album 1.Outside and its mooted follow-ups. Again, nothing.
And so when Bowie saw Lazarus, he witnessed the fulfilment of his most enduring creative ambition.
Bowie had played the role of Thomas Jerome Newton in the film The Man Who Fell To Earth, which was released in 1976. Newton was from another planet; he came to this world to find water, only to be corrupted by alcohol. Bowie’s affinity with Newton was profound.
Lazarus is a sequel of sorts. Newton is now a solitary figure, in a tower block, in New York City, still drinking, living only in theory. He is tormented by his past: not by memories of suffering, but by memories of love. He cannot die, and this is a problem.
The name of the play is ambiguous.
Its programme mentions Emma Lazarus and quotes her most famous poem, which cries out from beneath the feet of the Statue of Liberty, welcoming terrestrial aliens. Emma Lazarus was discussed as a significant figure in an earlier, aborted version of the play, but it is hard to discern even her shadow or her ghost in the final work.
There is a man named Lazarus in the Gospel according to John. Jesus loved Lazarus, and wept at his death. Jesus brought him back to life; from his tomb, Lazarus emerged with “hands and feet bound with strips of cloth, and his face wrapped in a cloth”. In Bowie’s final two music videos, his face is wrapped in a cloth.
There may be another reason the play is called Lazarus. But before we come to it, we must look elsewhere.
At one point, a character named Girl says to Newton: When you’re stuck between two worlds, it’s only right that you try something incredible.
Between two worlds. The phrase calls to mind Twin Peaks, the television series created by Mark Frost and David Lynch; there was also a Twin Peaks film, co-written and directed by Lynch.
At the strange heart of Twin Peaks is a poem, written by Lynch:
Through the darkness of future past
The magician longs to see
One chants out between two worlds
Fire walk with me
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me is the name of the film; David Bowie has a small role in it. Lynch gave him what might be the most significant line in all of Twin Peaks, delivered as a shocking revelation: We live inside a dream.
Much of what happens in Lazarus takes place inside a dream. Newton, it seems, is real; but it is unclear to what extent the other characters, and the various strange happenings of the play, are conjured by Newton’s mind.
Yet all this is happening in another mind. The design of the set evokes the inside of a head; the stage is behind the eyes.
And now we come to the work of Dennis Potter, specifically The Singing Detective. Potter was a major influence on Frost, and shared many predilections with Lynch. The Singing Detective was a BBC series broadcast in 1986, and depicted various extraordinary dream-like visions experienced by a man in hospital as he came to terms with himself.
Bowie wrote Lazarus with the playwright Enda Walsh. The Singing Detective featured prominently in their discussions about the play.
Lazarus was directed by Ivo van Hove. “He reminded me of Dennis Potter,” said van Hove about Bowie, because Potter “wrote scripts for television until the last moment he could”.
One of these dramas was called Karaoke. The other: Cold Lazarus.
You could call it taking stock. You could call it getting your affairs in order.
David Bowie had no desire to play live. Nevertheless, there was a series of Bowie residencies in prestigious venues; a world tour, in fact, beginning in 2013 and running for five years. London, São Paulo, Berlin, Paris, Melbourne, Barcelona, New York. It’s just that he didn’t need to turn up for any of it.
It was called David Bowie Is, and it took the form of an exhibition. Bowie’s people had contacted the Victoria & Albert Museum in 2010, suggesting it may want to display items from his archive, which numbered nearly 75,000 pieces and was an astonishingly exhaustive record of his life. Yes, said the V&A; we may want to do this.
The V&A was given total access to the archive, and Bowie gave it the freedom to present the resulting exhibition as it wished. It is fair to say the museum was not banking on it being a hit. “No other museum had booked it for the tour,” said its co-creator Victoria Broackes, “and we’d published 10,000 copies of the catalogue. There wasn’t a lot of optimism that it was going to be a rip-roaring success”.
As it turned out, it became the most popular exhibition in the history of the museum and proved successful everywhere it went.
It is notable that the instigator of David Bowie Is was David Bowie. Something was happening in these late years: he appeared to be curating his legacy. The Next Day, cover and all, was an archivist’s fantasy; David Bowie Is showed us the physical artefacts; Lazarus was the psychic experience.
And of course there would be another album, where it would all fuse and explode; but that is still to come.
“We looked a lot at stained-glass windows,” said Enda Walsh, “how a story is told with a central image. How it’s all broken and shattered.”
Lazarus, as one may expect, is unconventional. It is not your standard jukebox musical: it is not Bowie's We Will Rock You or Mamma Mia. There is no attempt to weave a tortuous plot around his greatest hits: there is no Starman waiting in the sky while Major Tom has a Moonage Daydream and all the Rebel Rebels enjoy their Golden Years and fall in Modern Love with China Girls in Suffragette City. In fact, it includes none of those songs; there is also no Ashes to Ashes, Fame, Ziggy Stardust or Let's Dance. Eight of its 17 songs were recorded after 2011; much of the older material is rearranged and rethought, sometimes radically. The music is integral to the show, but rarely in a straightforwardly narrative way: it is more commonly employed to express emotion and atmosphere. Bowie once said that his concerns as a writer were less what he felt about things, and more how things felt; that sense of expressionism is the work's dominant mood.
“He understood that what you’re putting out there is tone and atmosphere and not the detail of words or even character,” said Walsh. “It’s a real ‘what does it feel like? What is the big feeling that you’re sending people away with?’”
There is not much plot. Newton, now aged, still pines desperately for his lost love, Mary-Lou, and for his family; he seeks some kind of eternal rest, which is denied him. He is attended by various characters: these include a teenager initially known only as Girl; Elly, an assistant of sorts; and Valentine, a killer, familiar from The Next Day. The identities of some of these characters are never quite certain; they are fluid, amorphous. The set too, though sparse, is in flux.
The play is not particularly charming or warm. There are few smiles and even fewer laughs. Much of the the dialogue is stilted and faltering; this is presumably deliberate. The original production of Lazarus was staged in only two cities, first New York and then London, in small theatres; Michael C Hall was rather dour as Newton, but remained sufficiently enigmatic and sang well. Musically and visually, it was startling: wild visions and sounds transfigured the auditorium; a screen would sometimes relay the action on the stage but a second or two ahead of it, giving the impression that all was preordained. The overall effect was simultaneously engrossing and alienating; some critics loved it, some loathed it, which is perhaps as it should be.
Lazarus opened in New York in December 2015, running for just over two months. It closed in London in January 2017, following another run of just over two months. It has been performed since in only one theatre, with a different cast, in 2019 in Amsterdam, where van Hove has been based since the start of the century.
But that’s it. A recording of a performance in London was shown in New York in 2018, and streamed around the world for three nights in January 2021. But it is not available to watch anywhere now; in any case, it loses much of its impact when viewed on a screen. Among the cultural artefacts of the 21st century, especially those conceived by a major figure, it is immensely unusual: it has been and gone. There are no evident plans to revive it. Lazarus has happened.
"I honestly believe that my initial questions haven't changed at all. There are far fewer of them these days, but they're really important. Questioning my spiritual life has always been germane to what I was writing.”
So said Bowie in 2003. He had long ceased giving interviews by the time Lazarus came to the stage, but it seems that everything had clarified into two final spiritual preoccupations.
Walsh, in his introduction to the play’s text, wrote of his discussions with Bowie: “There was a lot of talk about the beauty of unconditional love.” We have already seen how the album The Next Day can be interpreted as a kind of treatise on love as a spiritual, metaphysical force, on how its presence brings life and meaning, and how its absence debases and destroys. Lazarus makes this idea even more explicit.
Newton is haunted by love. In the opening minutes of the play, he says:
“I was sitting here in the middle of the night and the television went off and I saw something coming out from the darkness. It’s a scene I couldn’t think about for years - and I came to me in the way a lot of these things do - in these pictures. It was morning time and I was sitting at home with my wife and son and daughter - and nothing special happened - just small talk between us that I can’t remember now - but I was there at home for a few moments with them. It was cruel in a way.”
Later, Girl reminds him:
“You had a daughter my age. Your wife and son would stay at home and you and your daughter used t’walk together - you walked to this hill near your house - and reaching the top of the hill you’d sit in the same place and watch the sky filling with stars. You’d make up stories about travelling through space and when you paused a little - your daughter would say - ‘Speak some more - and we’ll travel on’.”
There was romantic love, too, as Girl explains:
“You were sent here from another planet and you never got back home to your family. You got real rich – started a bunch of companies. You tried to leave once before and these people did experiments on you and they hurt you really bad – turned you crazy – and you wouldn’t prove what you were to them – and they stopped you leaving. And you were in love with this woman called Mary-Lou. But she left years ago – and you’re still stuck here drinking gin and not being able to die or leave.
“That’s why your head’s sick. You’re heartbroken over all that stuff.”
Valentine, the antagonist, is the destroyer of love. He is drawn to it - “I’m a hopeless romantic - I just go doolally over all that stuff” - like a leopard is drawn to an antelope.
Face to face with Elly, he says:
“I was walking past this building and something inside told me to stop - and it felt like someone needed my help - so I step into the lobby and see you coming out of the elevator and I see that you’re crying, right? So do you love someone - you don’t have to answer that - but is that why you were crying? I think it might have been - you and Mr Newton - it’s about you two being in love?”
Valentine is revealed as a murderer. He sings the song Valentine’s Day; the staging involved numerous black balloons being burst, in imitation of rapid gunfire. Black wings unfurl behind him; his presence is demonic, his personality that of Satan the suave charmer: “If I can give you anything at all, Mr Newton - it will be the support and help you need towards finding a more peaceful place. I can do that - I know I can.” During the Valentine’s Day section, the stage directions state: Slowly glides downstage like Fred Astaire - the space around him turning black.
Valentine says: “There’ll always be a love that needs killing.”
The other spiritual preoccupation: life. It always had been there, of course; but now there seemed to be a greater urgency, perhaps even a desperation, inspired by an understanding that Life was more precious, more extraordinary, than even Bowie had appreciated.
Just before Girl appears, early in the play, Newton quotes Hamlet: “In this sleep of death - what dreams may come…” The line is from the soliloquy beginning “To be, or not to be, that is the question”.
Van Hove said he was interested in two basic things. One was politics in its broad sense. The other: “Our existence, as in Lazarus. Why are we here? Can we make sense of it? We could commit suicide. Why don’t we?”
Bowie said in 1996 that spirituality had been a “recurrent qualification of my work from the day I started writing. A very early example, I suppose, is Space Oddity. A more obvious example would be Word on a Wing”.
In Lazarus, neither song is sung, but both songs are lived.
Word on a Wing was Bowie’s hymn of devotion and cry for help. He wrote it in 1975, in his darkest time. It begins: In this age of grand illusion, you walked into my life out of my dreams.
There were four new Bowie songs in Lazarus. One of them is called When I Met You; it is the penultimate song of the play, and may well be its dramatic climax. When I Met You tells of an encounter that brings redemption; this is how the song ends:
When I met you
I was too insane
Could not trust a thing
I was off my head
I was filled with truth
It was not God's truth
Before I met you
The three other new songs were called Lazarus, Killing a Little Time and No Plan.
Lazarus can be heard at this point as a song relating the story and anguish of Newton. It went on to acquire far greater significance, the line between Newton and Bowie finally evaporating; but this is where it began.
Killing a Little Time is the sound of rage against death.
No Plan sounds like it could be sung from heaven; or at least from between two worlds. It just - just - defies the laws of gravity.
Newton sings When I Met You to Girl; then he stabs her. Valentine told him to.
Newton lets her gently down to the ground - the knife covered with her blood.
So say the stage directions. Valentine turns away and is lost in the darkness.
Newton whispers: No no no no no…
Then:
“I’m not of this world. And not yet marked by this place here. Not pinned down in this apartment - not divided into days and praying for my death - and bullied by this broken mind - and before all of this happened to me - and before the journey down here - to wake in the place I was born. And to be up there - and to feel the simple love of family. To be back there in that home - my sad past… rewritten now. (Slight pause.) Because my daughter wakes. (Slight pause.) Wake up. (Slight pause.) One last time, wake up, wake up. Wake up. (Slight pause.) And half-asleep and her arms around her brother - she talks his dream from him and keeps him in that sweet unreal place.”
Girl slowly opens her eyes
Newton: “The door opens to our garden - and far in the distance - the hill - and we walk to it.”
Girl: “Countryside disappears under our feet - there’s only us two and that hill and the blue sky.”
Newton, a few lines later: “I’m done with this life - so a new universe I’ll dream big up there. And although always stuck inside this breaking mind - I’ve stepped off this earth and into that better place. An imagined world. (Slight pause.) My new family.”
Girl: “Right. Your new family.”
“I’ve found out my name’s Marley, Mr Newton.”
Newton: “So, Marley - Do you think we can get lost in these stars?”
Marley: “Speak some more - and we’ll travel on.”
They sing “Heroes”, the song of love’s victory over the powers of death, the song that affirms the courage to be.
A shape is drawn on the floor. It promises a means of escape, or a means of enlightenment; perhaps they are the same. We are back in 1975, back with Kabbalah, back with the Tree of Life.
The tree here is sharpened into the shape of a rocket. In the production, we see Newton lie in it; a screen shows it lifting off, in silence.
The stage directions say only:
Marley leaves.
Newton finds rest.
Blackout.
The end.
Ivo van Hove said of Bowie: “I saw, not his death struggle, but his struggle for life.”
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