MUSIK. Wilton’s Music Hall.

Billie Trix is still standing, just. Dishevelled, intoxicated, unrepentant, snorting large quantities of coke washed down with neat Jack Daniels, yet still here. You would not, it has to be said, want the “zeitgeist for sore eyes” as a neighbour. Still, 60 minutes in her abrasive, subversive, and often unhinged company—the last great diva of the 20th century, clinging to her outrageous myths—is about as much fun as there is to be had on the London stage.

Co-created by Jonathan Harvey and the Pet Shop Boys for the not-very-good 2001 musical Closer to Heaven, and embodied in a phenomenal turn by Frances Barber, Billie received her own show, MUSIK, in 2019. A mash-up of blistering one-liner monologue, cabaret song-cycle, and confessional angst, this immensely welcome revival at Wilton’s Music Hall is both a hymn to endurance and the power of self-invention, and a biting satire on the delusions of celebrity culture.  The glittering line-up of household names in the audience at press night suggests her stream-of-consciousness musings on celebrity strikes an accurate chord.

“A little mongrel born at the edge of hell”, in the ruins of wartime Berlin, Billie is a drag Forrest Gump refracted through a haze of vodka, amphetamines, and sequins — the accidental survivor of every key 20th-century cultural moment she does not actually belong to. The inspiration for Madonna (“that bitch stole my look”), we learn that she is Andy Warhol’s greatest muse, the inspiration for his soup cans. He once told her, “You are the only one I can’t make superficial”.

Dali paints her. A conflicted Jean-Paul Sartre chides her for her pretentiousness. Jackson Pollock’s greatest works may have resulted from an accident with her menstrual blood. Tracy Emin and Damien Hirst take inspiration from the ten years Billie spends living in a phone box in Soho Square. She is a lover of both Lou Reed (“you have clit like a treble clef”, he tells her admiringly) and Donald Trump (“hair like shredded wheat, penis like a walnut whip”), yet her only significant relationship is with drugs; “I was once in a k-hole that lasted three months” she admits with matter of fact insouciance.

What makes Frances Barber’s Billie such an iconic figure is that, beneath the delusional veneer, there are flashes of self-awareness. Loneliness and regret rear a serpentine head, only for the grandiose illusions to reassert themselves with even greater force. However grotesque she is on the surface, the push-and-pull between intimate revelation and contrived celebrity makes Billie a deeply human figure, deserving of empathy and admiration. The songs are variable, and Billie cannot sing to save her life (her gruff, gravelly voice the result of a lifetime giving oral sex), but the show is absolutely iconic.

Writer:   Jonathan Harvey and Pet Shop Boys

Director:  Terry Johnson