But, watching this spectacular study of a pained outsider’s search for peace, I too felt a sense of alienation. Hall star in David Bowie and Enda Walshs Lazarus, directed by Ivo van Hove, at New York Theatre Workshop. Of course, it’s great to hear the Bowie songs and his death lends the show a patina of melancholy. Yet, for all the show’s skill, I found myself more impressed by the visual sophistication than emotionally engaged by the story: only when Lennox sang of her divided self and when Hall gazed wistfully at the lost delights of earthly love was I moved. I also admired Michael C Hall, who conveys the desperation of the lonely, time-suspended Thomas and Michael Esper, who lends Valentine, a serial killer symbolising Earth’s dark forces, a saturnine vigour. ![]() The deliberate plainness of the surround is offset by the profusion of images that pour from a central screen depicting everything from the neon sickness of urban America to the Berlin background of Where Are We Now? At one point a character even emerges from the screen to become a peripatetic hologram. Van Hove, his long-term designer Jan Versweyveld and the video designer Tal Yarden have created an engrossing spectacle. But Bowie buffs will be delighted to hear so many songs very well played by an onstage band situated behind a clear acrylic screen. When Amy Lennox – the main newcomer to the cast and outstanding as Elly – sings the 1971 song Changes, it seems a logical expression of her urge to transform herself into the lost Mary-Lou.Īt other times, as when the whey-faced Sophia Anne Caruso as Girl sings Life on Mars?, I felt the number, which is surely about earthbound ennui, is less strictly relevant to the character. Of the 17 songs some are old, some new and, at best, they extend the dramatic situation. The ingredients are all there, but do they add up to a memorable show? Yes and no. Thomas quotes Hamlet’s “In that sleep of death what dreams may come”, suggesting he identifies with the Danish prince torn between two worlds, and it is no accident that the ghostly Girl is called Marley, like Scrooge’s revenant partner in A Christmas Carol. Hall, Original New York Cast Of Lazarus Lazarus A3 Michael C. Walsh’s script is also stuffed with literary clues. A1 Ricky Nelson (2) Hello Mary Lou (Goodbye Heart) A2 Michael C. ![]() It was also shrewd of Bowie to engage Walsh to write the book because, in plays such as Ballyturk and The Walworth Farce, the Irish dramatist has shown a hypnotised fascination with characters who create fantasy worlds to allay their solitude. I took it to be an exploration of the existential angst that pervades Bowie’s music: this is the story of a man never wholly at ease in himself or his surroundings. Many New York critics, on the show’s debut last December, professed to be bewildered by the plot. An engrossing spectacle … Michael C Hall and Sophia Anne Caruso Photograph: Tristram Kenton for the Guardian
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