Murray Bramwell

Here Lies Love – A Song Cycle
Music by David Byrne and Fat Boy Slim

Ridley Centre, Royal Adelaide Showground
March 11. Tickets $59 – $20. Bookings BASS 131 246
Until March 14.

By way of preface to Here Lies Love, David Byrne wonders how people can justify “their nastier behaviours to themselves” – but twenty four songs and a reprise later, we are still not any the wiser. Imelda Marcos is both an interesting subject and an unlikely one, and that is the potential appeal of Byrne’s idiosyncratic project. He is proposing that Imelda is no more the sum of her shoes than Jackie Kennedy was just a collection of pillbox hats.

We get plenty of backstory – her origins in genteel poverty, her doting nanny Estrelle, her Scarlett O’Hara determination to get ahead in the world. She wins second prize in a beauty contest and declares herself the winner – rather like Ferdinand Marcos’ rigged election. Ferdy courts her in eleven whirlwind days as, destined by fate, they become the King and Queen of Hearts. Imelda is kitsch and cruel, enterprising, and in her “handbag diplomacy” – visiting Gaddafi, Kissinger, and a string of US presidents – politically astute.

In a venue set up as part dance club, part conventional theatre, Byrne narrates Imelda’s story in a series of off-the-cuff links between songs that are, at once, disarming, unfocused and time-consuming. A barrage of photo images unfolds on the large screen behind the concert stage where an excellent band, featuring percussion and keyboards, supports impressive vocalists Dana Diaz-Tutaan (Imelda) Ganda Suthivarakom (Estrella) and the impish Mr Byrne himself. The songs, while co-written with Fat Boy Slim, bear strong Byrne signatures – catchy tunes, punchy rhythms and animated vocals.

But there is little evidence of director Marianne Weems here. Is Byrne’s casually consulted clipboard a rejection of the slick narrative connections that are the dreary convention of the usual cabaret biog, or evidence of a show underdone ? The abundance of new songs is a treat for David Byrne admirers – but many cover similar threads in Imelda’s early life and her abandonment of the faithful Estrella, leaving us to make large inferences about the complicity of the American government in the Marcos story and no time to reflect on the downhill ride. There are intriguing ironies in David Byrne’s approach to Imelda but we need more perspective and contrast. Here Lies Love is a likeable concert – full of good tunes and unfathomable ambiguities. It may yet be a terrific show, with perceptive themes and liberating anti-theatrical elements, but at the moment, the festival is hosting an uncertain work in progress.

“A steel butterfly still emerging” The Australian, March 13, 2006. p.16.