Hard on the vertiginous heels of Savage Beauty, the V&A’s record-breaking Alexander McQueen exhibition, comes this transfer from the St James Theatre of James Phillips’s paean to the designer. The play — a sort of aimless fashion fantasia — has been tweaked and partially recast. Yet packaged in a slick, shiny production by John Caird, it remains as lifeless as an artful arrangement of mannequins in a window display.
In no way to blame for that is Stephen Wight, who plays McQueen (or Lee, his real first name) with scorching commitment and an uncanny authenticity. Nervy and volatile, he’s part couture bad boy, part fragile innocent, his soft, light delivery wrapped around east London vowels, his shaven head almost like a baby’s.
Sadly, Phillips’s writing, naively in thrall to the cliché of the tormented artist, gives him little to work with beyond biographical gobbets and adolescent banalities.
We find Lee in despair: facing a deadline with a dearth of ideas for his new collection and contemplating suicide. He’s interrupted by Dahlia (Carly Bawden), an urchin fangirl who claims she’s been watching him from the branches of a tree outside. Together they set off on a nocturnal odyssey through London, flitting from Savile Row, where he was an apprentice, to an interview with a snooty fashion hack and a celestial encounter with the ghost of the stylist Isabella Blow.
Along the way, dancers strut and pose, catwalk-style, against hectic video projections, and some of McQueen’s famous imagery is suggested: the corsets, the vivid plumage, the sumptuous and the macabre. As Dahlia — whose character derives from McQueen’s 2008 fairytale-inspired collection The Girl Who Lived in the Tree — Bawden herself looks avian, with her beaky nose and ruffled raven hair. Yet she’s merely a device representing a fragment of Lee’s troubled mind.
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And although Tracy-Ann Oberman is enormously enlivening as a statuesque, silken Blow, with lisping whiskey voice, she too is forced to wallow in trite, circuitous maunderings. “Alexander!” she cries, recalling her own depressive agonies. “I was squeaming inside!” Good gwief.
McQueen’s talent was immense, his death tragic; this starry-eyed tribute, despite some striking spectacle, is surprisingly tasteless.
Box office: 020 7930 8800, to Nov 7