Theater of Cruelty (37 page)

Osborne could have written this in one of his diaries for
The Spectator
. There is some disdain in these words for hoi polloi, the TV-watching masses in their ghastly leisure clothes, for what Harold Nicolson called the “Woolworth’s world.” The play is also a lament for a world that Bennett himself, among others of his generation, lampooned. As usual it is Bennett who best explains his own feelings. His heart, he writes in his diary, “is very much in Gielgud’s final speech in which he bids farewell to Albion House and this old England. And yet the world we have lost wasn’t one in which I would have been happy, though I look back on it and read about it with affection.”

This feeling of ambivalence, romantic and skeptical at the same time, is “what the play is trying to resolve.” Of course it didn’t succeed. It couldn’t have. It never will be resolved, it never has been. But it has inspired the English theater since Shakespeare. What is
Henry V
, if not an expression of ambivalence, toward the king, toward England?

Burgess’s treachery, at least in Bennett’s interpretation, falls into the same category. Burgess tells Coral Browne: “I can say I love London.
I can say I love England. I can’t say I love my country, because I don’t know what that means.” Bennett writes that this is “a fair statement of my own, and I imagine many people’s, position.” Perhaps it is. Bennett also believes that betrayal is an extension of skepticism and irony. Possibly so. But Burgess says something else, something closer to the bone. When Browne asks him why he became a spy, he answers: Solitude. Keeping secrets offers solitude. Was Burgess’s double-act, like King George’s “what, what,” like Osborne’s country squire, like
Bennett
, a façade behind which a shy man could hide from a nation of snoops?

It’s impossible to be sure. But Burgess pulled off a remarkable act, for he was so brazen, so openly outrageous, so Toad-like that he seemed not to have been acting at all. I have never met Bennett (or Burgess, for that matter), but I suspect he is as different from Burgess as Toad is from Mole. Yet one line in
An Englishman Abroad
sticks in my mind. Burgess: “I never pretended. If I wore a mask it was to be exactly as I seemed.” Is this the spy speaking, or is it the author? What, what?

DAVID BOWIE
: “My trousers changed the world.”
A fashionable man in dark glasses
: “I think it was more the shoes.”
Bowie
: “It was the shoes.”
¹
He laughs. It is a joke. Up to a point.

There is no question that Bowie changed the way many people looked in the 1970s, 1980s, even 1990s. He set styles. Fashion designers—Alexander McQueen, Yamamoto Kansai, Dries Van Noten, Jean Paul Gaultier, et al.—were inspired by him. Bowie’s extraordinary
stage costumes, from Kabuki-like bodysuits to Weimar-era drag, are legendary. Young people all over the world tried to dress like him, look like him, move like him—alas, with rather variable results.

So it is entirely fitting that the Victoria and Albert Museum should stage a huge exhibition of Bowie’s stage clothes, as well as music videos, handwritten song lyrics, film clips, artworks, scripts, storyboards, and other Bowieana from his personal archive.
²
Apart from everything else, Bowie’s art is about style, high and low, and style is serious business for a museum of art and design.

One of the characteristics of rock music is that so much of it involves posing, or “role-playing,” as they say in the sex manuals. Rock is above all a theatrical form. English rockers have been particularly good at this, partly because many of them, including Bowie himself, have drawn inspiration from the rich tradition of music-hall theater. If Chuck Berry was a godfather of British rock, so was the vaudevillian Max Miller, the Cheeky Chappie, in his daisy-patterned suits. But there is another reason: rock and roll being American in origin, English musicians often started off mimicking Americans. More than that, in the 1960s especially, white English boys imitated black Americans. Then there was the matter of class: working-class English kids posing as aristocratic fops, and solidly middle-class young men affecting Cockney accents. And the gender-bending: Mick Jagger wriggling his hips like Tina Turner, Ray Davies of the Kinks camping it up like a pantomime dame, Bowie dressing like Marlene Dietrich and shrieking like Little Richard. And none of them was gay, at least not most of the time. Rock, English rock especially, has often seemed like a huge, anarchic dressing-up party.

No one took this further, with more imagination and daring, than Bowie. At a time when American groups would often dress down—affluent suburban kids disguised as Appalachian farmers or Canadian lumberjacks—Bowie quite deliberately dressed
up
. In his words: “I can’t stand the premise of going out [on stage] in jeans … and looking as real as you can in front of 18,000 people. I mean, it’s not normal!” Also in his words: “My whole professional life is an act … I slip from one guise to another very easily.”

The costumes of Bowie’s rock theater are all on display at the V&A. And many are outrageously beautiful. The red-and-blue quilted suit and red plastic boots designed by Freddie Burretti for Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust character in 1972. Yamamoto Kansai’s kimono-like cape splashed with Bowie’s name in Chinese characters for
Aladdin Sane
in 1973. Natasha Korniloff’s surrealistic cobweb bodysuit with false black-nail-polished hands tickling the nipples for the 1980 Floor Show. Ola Hudson’s black pants and waistcoat for Bowie’s incarnation as the Thin White Duke in 1976, which look as though they were designed for a male impersonator. And Alexander McQueen’s exquisitely “distressed” Union Jack frock coat from 1997. Then there is the perverse nautical gear, and the “Tokyo pop” black vinyl bodysuit, the matador cape, the blue turquoise boots, and on and on.

Bowie’s image was as carefully contrived for album covers as for the actual musical performances: Sukita Masayoshi’s black-and-white photograph of Bowie posing like a mannequin doll on the cover of “
Heroes
” (1977), or Bowie stretched out on a blue velvet sofa like a Pre-Raphaelite pinup in a long satin dress designed by Mr Fish for
The Man Who Sold the World
(1971), or Guy Peellaert’s lurid drawing of Bowie as a 1920s carnival freak for
Diamond Dogs
(1974).

All these images were created by Bowie in collaboration with other artists. He drew his inspiration from anything that happened
to catch his fancy: Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin of the 1930s, Hollywood divas of the 1940s, Kabuki theater, William Burroughs, English mummers, Jean Cocteau, Andy Warhol, French chansons, Buñuel’s surrealism, and Stanley Kubrick’s movies, especially
A Clockwork Orange
, whose mixture of high culture, science fiction, and lurking menace suited Bowie to the ground. Artists and filmmakers have often created interesting results by refining popular culture into high art. Bowie did the opposite: he would, as he once explained in an interview, plunder high art and take it down to the street; that was his brand of rock-and-roll theater.

What has been truly unusual about Bowie, in comparison to other rock acts, is the lightning speed of his costume changes. His musical changes reflected this, from the throbbing rhythm of the early Velvet Underground to the harsh dissonances of Kurt Weill to the disco beat of 1970s Philadelphia. The range of his singing voice, aching in some songs, full of bravura in others, but always haunted by a sense of danger, helped him straddle many genres. To get the excitement of Bowie’s best live performances, one would have had to be there, but the artful videos, made by Bowie with various talented filmmakers, some of which are displayed to great effect at the V&A show, still give a flavor of his theatrical appeal.

Two of the most famous videos are
Ashes to Ashes
(1980) and
Boys Keep Swinging
(1979), both directed by David Mallet. Bowie plays three roles in
Ashes to Ashes
: an astronaut, a man curled up in a padded cell, and a tragic Pierrot tormented by his mother. In
Boys Keep Swinging
, Bowie appears as a late-1950s rock and roller, and plays all three backup singers in Hollywood diva drag: two end up whipping their wigs off in a kind of fury; one turns into a menacing maternal figure. A common feature in Bowie’s videos, as well as his stage shows, is an obsession with masks and mirrors, sometimes several mirrors at the same time: his characters watch themselves being
watched. In his earlier interviews, Bowie spoke often about schizophrenia. Stage roles would spill out into his personal life. As he put it: “I couldn’t decide whether I was writing characters or whether the characters were writing me.”

So who is David Bowie? He was born in 1947 as David Jones in Brixton, South London, but grew up mostly in Bromley, a relatively genteel and deeply dreary suburb. Many rockers, including Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, grew up in such places, which the novelist J. G. Ballard, who lived for most of his adult life in Twickenham, described as

Like Jagger and Richards, the young David Jones was roused from suburban torpor by the sounds of American rock and roll. He recalled that he “wanted to be a white Little Richard at eight or at least his sax player.”

David’s family background was not strictly conventional. His father, “John” Jones, was a failed music impresario and piano bar operator (the Boop-a-Doop in Charlotte Street, Soho) who lost his money promoting the career of his first wife, Chérie, “the Viennese Nightingale.” David’s mother, “Peggy” Burns, was a cinema usherette. Still, Bromley was Bromley. The bright lights beckoned.

For much of the 1960s, Bowie’s pop career, varied but unsuccessful, did not yet point to the theatrical sensation he was to become. He always looked sharp but not yet extraordinary. There were false
starts: an ice-cream commercial, a jokey song entitled “The Laughing Gnome.” He changed his name to Bowie, after the Bowie knife, because another Davy Jones had become famous as one of the Monkees. Then, in the late 1960s, he met two people who would change his life: the English dancer and mime artist Lindsay Kemp, with whom Bowie had an affair, and Angela Barnett, an American model whom he soon married. I saw Kemp dance once in London, in the early 1970s, in a solo piece based on Jean Genet’s
Our Lady of the Flowers
, I believe. He was an extraordinary presence on stage, in whiteface, wide-eyed, delicate, flitting about, a little like Vivien Leigh in
A Streetcar Named Desire
.

Kemp taught Bowie how to use his body, how to dance, pose, mime. And it was Kemp who introduced Bowie to Kabuki. Kemp was fascinated by the
onnagata
tradition of male actors playing female roles. Kabuki is a good fit for Bowie, a theater of extravagant, stylized gestures. At climactic moments the actors freeze, as though in a photograph, while striking a particularly dramatic pose. Bowie never became a great actor, but he did become a great poseur, in the best sense of the word; he always moves with peculiar grace. Without the influence of Kemp, he might not have made the next step in his career, merging rock music with theater, film, and dance. They put on a show together called
Pierrot in Turquoise
. Bowie learned how to use costumes and lighting to the best effect. Sets would become ever more elaborate, featuring images from Buñuel movies or Fritz Lang’s
Metropolis
.

But the main thing he got from Kemp was his taste for turning life itself into a performance, another Kabuki-like influence. In the old days
onnagata
actors were encouraged to dress up as women in real life too. Bowie said about Kemp: “His day-to-day life was the most theatrical thing I’d ever seen, ever. Everything I thought Bohemia probably was, he was living.”