Five years on, David Bowie's Lazarus is still utterly bamboozling

Five years after his death, due tribute is being paid to David Bowie – not that he has been far from the thoughts and playlists of millions. Among the highlights is the "live-stream" of his late 2015 stage-musical, captured during its 2016 London premiere run.

The resurrection of Lazarus is an undoubted boon for fans, not least because it contains a stash of Bowie greats and rarities in its art-house take on the jukebox musical model (whereby a storyline is concocted to link existing numbers). Those unable to see it before, and managing to catch it this time (tricky, owing to the minimal viewing opportunities), can also ascertain what the fuss (or lack of it) was about. There was no critical consensus in New York or here – some bowed low, others (like myself) expressed gratitude and disappointment, some dismissed it out of hand.

The timing of the release augments the innate poignancy of the project – conceived by the great man, and developed by him (along with director Ivo van Hove and playwright Enda Walsh) while he was (unbeknownst to the world) dying of liver cancer.

A manifestly experimental-minded sequel to The Man Who Fell to Earth (the 1976 film of which imposingly and plausibly starred Bowie as stranded humanoid Thomas Newton), it brings to the fore the themes of solitude, alienation and yearning for connection with which his back-catalogue abounds. Newton’s desire to leave Earth’s gravity and head for the stars – culminating in a blast-off that denotes both a kind of escape and dread mortality – equates with an artistic parting-shot. The first sung lines of the evening – “Look up here, I’m in heaven” – couldn’t sound more valedictory.

It might be argued that our lockdown lives – with attendant pandemic-stoked brushes with death – have further added piquancy to Newton’s predicament, as he shuffles around an imprisoning pad, reaching for the liquor. The pacing restlessness of Michael C Hall’s damaged and disintegrating recluse may now be more relatable but in my view the evening is still hampered by its nagging compulsion to bamboozle.

Bowie’s songs (gems range from 1970’s The Man Who Sold The World past Changes, Life on Mars?, and Absolute Beginners to four items from The Next Day, including Where Are We Now?) entail their own cryptic theatre of the mind. Walsh’s script binds them via an abstruse psychodrama involving an overly attached female assistant and a spirited-up girl who’s in a kindred state of  limbo; whether the characters are flesh and blood or otherworldly, the piece doesn’t live and breathe with sufficient organic force.

When the cast are able to sing without investing the lines with too much insinuated dramatic meaning, the music (as you’d imagine) works like a charm – Hall, in particular, pulls off the feat of copying the star’s lilt without resembling a two-bit impressionist. And when sound is allied to fittingly pioneering (video-projected) vision, the effect is truly out of this world. While Bowie’s legacy is destined to live on, though, Lazarus still looks like a footnote.

Streaming until Sunday January 9: link.dice.fm/lazarus