Morrissey: the musical

Great pop music is theatre. From Elvis’s libidinous hips-and-lips shake to Hendrix’s flaming guitar; Madonna’s Jesus-snogging to Eminem’s chainsaw-wielding: the defining performances of the past 50 years owe as much to the traditions of Greek tragedy and Renaissance stagecraft as they do to the innovations of rock’n’roll and MTV. What we seek in music is not just hooks and rhythms, but action and image: in short, drama.

So it’s no surprise that when the spheres of pop and theatre align, we are spellbound. We pour, in our thousands, into West End theatres to see Queen’s sci-fi opera We Will Rock You, Abba’s familial hit-parade Mama Mia and Rod Stewart’s Faustian ego-trip Tonight’s the Night — no matter how ludicrous the show. But the subjects of pop musicals must fulfil certain criteria: if you’re not an international chart-topper with a vault of exhilarating anthems, you’re not coming in. Given this rule, it’s a shock to discover that Morrissey — the bespectacled, working-class, celibate Mancunian who, with guitarist Johnny Marr and the rest of the Smiths, spent the 1980s recording morose laments like Heaven Knows I’m Miserable — has joined the club. The songs of Morrissey and Marr, their gritty Englishness more suited to Loach than Lloyd Webber, have been adapted into Some Girls are Bigger than Others, a piece of music theatre opening at the Lyric Hammersmith on Friday.

At first it seems an hilariously incongruous match. But in fact Morrissey relied just as heavily on theatricality as did Freddie Mercury, cultivating his eccentricity, sexual ambivalence and outspoken wit into a contrary public persona. Onstage he wore a hearing aid and NHS specs — his “disability-chic” contrasted gleefully with the gladioli protruding from his back pocket and his bare-chested, arm-flinging dancing. For Morrissey, these performances had the unity of a Shakespeare play: “Everything has to blend . . . it’s like King Lear to me.” His songs, too, were dramatic: bleak, funny vignettes about doomed relationships, lonely nightclubs, the burden of the past and the prison of the home.

Andrew Wale and Perrin Manzer Allen, of Anonymous Society — the company behind Some Girls — argue that all this makes Morrissey’s music ideal material for a show. They have the experience to make it work: their award-winning 1999 Edinburgh production, based on the songs of Jacques Brel, was hailed as a triumphant marriage of dance, music and theatre. For Wale, the director, it’s the juxtaposition of “dark humour and a deadly seriousness” that attracts him to Brel and Morrissey. Moreover, Morrissey’s music offers infinite capacity for interpretation: “I honestly believe that no two Smiths fans derive the same meaning from any song: they are too flexible, too rich, too textured.”

This is crucial, for Anonymous Society are not engaged in a straightforward West End-style homage. There is no mention of Morrissey or the Smiths in the show: instead, 20 songs form a series of interlocking narratives, based around a “strange, dislocated family” (a recurring theme in the lyrics). Onstage, six performers are joined by a string quartet, who play Manzer Allen’s score, accompanied by prerecorded rhythmic soundscapes. The songs engender a wild variety of different styles of movement and music: from edgy physicality to table-top tap-dancing, Bj?rk-esque pulses to parodic, operatic pomp. Whereas the Brel show was set in a kind of purgatory, Some Girls is an exercise in extremities, encompassing “hellish moments of interaction” and “brief glimpses of enlightenment”.

A scene viewed in rehearsal raises high hopes for the production: Morrissey’s portrait of a destructive but inescapable relationship (I Started Something I Couldn’t Finish) is played out as a grim marriage, a bored couple dancing a queasily funny “show-must-go-on” number with teeth-grinding sexuality. There is evidence, too, of Anonymous Society’s democratic, genre-blending modus operandi — usual in the work of avant-garde choreographers like Pina Bausch and Alain Platel, but rare in the world of musicals, where Wale and Manzer Allen met. Weary of blasting out excerpts from Phantom of the Opera for cosmetics salesmen in Baden-Baden, together they sought a way of combining their passions for opera, theatre, dance and pop. They have picked their collaborators from many backgrounds: the Some Girls team includes a Norwegian trained in opera, an Israeli musical veteran and an American nu-folk songwriter.

To many fans, the songs of the Smiths are sacred texts. How will they react to Anonymous Society’s radical interpretations? Both Morrissey and Marr like the concept, and have given their approval. But that hasn’t stopped the grumbling. On internet forums, one devotee complains of Anonymous Society’s “theft”. Another bluntly opines: “I can’t wait to miss this.” Wale admits that as a young fan he would have agreed. But as he grew up he realised that he didn’t want to “put the music on a pedestal and leave it cold — I realised it was something that should be used and explored”.

Wale is in fact paying Morrissey the ultimate compliment. For a musician who — like so many of our pop icons — thrived on both theatricality and collaboration (with Marr), it seems fitting that his work should find a second life on Anonymous Society’s strange and fertile stage.

Some Girls are Bigger than Others is at the Lyric Hammersmith, London W6 (08700 500511), on July 1-23, and will tour in the autumn; www.ghmp.co.uk