Evita and the politics of celebrity

Rachel Zegler in Evita at the London Palladium

I'd so far steered clear of the unstoppable juggernaut called The Jamie Lloyd Company. It all feels a bit too mogul formulaic for me: hire a mega-star, put them in a play people have heard of, hire a West End theatre, charge a fortune for tickets, give it a grunge aesthetic...   In fairness, there have clearly been times when it's worked incredibly well: the James McAvoy Cyrano sounds fascinating, for example - but then there was the Sigourney Weaver Tempest....  

Evita felt like a better bet: it's a piece that belongs in the West End, that really is a star vehicle, and (like most musicals) benefits from a bit of whizz-kid directing. It's also a bit of a nostalgia piece for me. I saw the original production with my parents and brother when we stopped off in London on our way to Heathrow for a family holiday. Kelly Hunter, who has since become a great friend, played Peron's Mistress. She was 17 then, and so was I. We're a bit older now. I had the recording, and knew all the words. Actually, it seems I still do.

Jamie Lloyd's production is far removed from that original by Hal Prince, with its 1940s costumes and recreations of press images. Aside of the lyrics, and occasional hints of Hispanic accents ("ArHentina" passim), there's precious little sense of mid-century Latin America at all. It's a rock concert. Rachel Zegler makes her first appearance as a curtain lifts to show her standing in her black leather bra and hotpants in front of a huge illuminated sign that says "Evita". The audience roars. Subtle it is not - but as a staging of the character's funeral, you can't fault it for radical deconstruction.

And the radical deconstruction works. As the evening travels through a series of stadium-style, high-energy, crowd-pleasing choreographic showstoppers, you can't help but get caught up in the sheer stariness of the whole thing, and particularly the central performance. Rachel Zegler's singing is wonderful, and she exudes vitality at the centre of the dance numbers. It was like watching the young Madonna - which is more than a little ironic, given Madonna's lacklustre performance of a role she might have been born to play in the film version. But that's political theatre for you: if you're too close to the character, you're in no position to offer a commentary. Such was the scale of Madonna's Evita-like ego that she insisted on singing the Mistress's song herself, and requested a new, mawkishly sentimental number to garner audience sympathy as Eva nears her end ("You must love me" is unfortunately retained here - and the production loses focus as a result). What is fascinating in Rachel Zegler's performance is that, for all her magnetism, she has no fear of playing against audience sympathy, moving in sudden leaps from charismatic star to amoral manipulator. So, even as you ride the rock-concert wave of it all, you come to see ever more clearly the shocking politics behind it. It's a show about celebrity, about politics as celebrity, about stardom as self-interest, about policy as profiteering. 

Rachel Zegler sings from the balcony

The big number comes directly after the interval. It's become a cause célèbre, but not for appropriate reasons. Unless, of course, the marketing guys planned it that way...  Certainly the column inches spent on Zegler singing from the Palladium balcony to the (horror - unpaying) crowd of adoring fans in the street outside have contributed significantly to the size of that crowd: not so much unpaying audience as unpaid extras whose numbers more than suggest the people of Argentina, gathered to hear Eva Peron's speech at her husband's inauguration. They are, of coure, Zegler's fans; but in this construct, relayed by video to the (paying) theatre audience, they become Evita's fans too, and a complex metatheatrical metaphor is established. It's all the more telling because this is the only moment in the show where Eva is dressed in the expected historical costume, and those of us in the theatre get to see her remove the spangled dress and the blonde wig in the aftermath of the big number. That powerful image of Eva Peron orating from the balcony of the Casa Rosada, which later became the image of the starry musical and the hit song, is exposed as a theatrical and electonically mediated construct. And still we clap, and still we cheer.

Back in the 70s, there were two stars in the Prince production. Elaine Paige was Evita, and David Essex played opposite her as Che Guevara (they never met in real life, although Che did once write Evita a letter asking her to buy him a jeep). In those days, Che did present a form of left-wing stardom, his poster image adorning many a student wall. David Essex was perfect casting: not only for the look, but because he exuded an edgy, sexy, working-class anger. Jamie Lloyd offers no such hope: and I'm afraid he's probably right. His Che, as Andrzej Lukowski puts in in his excellent Time Out review, "assumes more of a Jiminy Cricket role": you would never know this young man with a nice voice was anything more than a slightly grumpy older brother. There is no hint of activism, never mind revolution. Charisma left the left a long time ago, and theory (of which Guevara was very aware) now insists on the collective rather than the star. Celebrity is entirely the tool of the right, and politics has become its playground. Rags to riches stories, amazing singers emerging from obscurity, these are the tools of the individualistic neoliberal narrative. 

We paid a lot to go and see a rising mega-star. The production powerfully and intelligently questioned that action. And pocketed our cash.