Billie Trix is a 70-something star of stage and screen , always full of enthusiasm but clearly in other eyes completely hopeless as a performer, as a daughter and mother.
She is the comic invention of Jonathan Harvey and Pet Shop Boys have written wonderful pastiche songs to cover her many decades of weird almost-super stardom.
Born, she tells us, in the ruins of 1945 Berlin she has a hate/hate relationship with her mother -“ I never knew my mother , except day to day “ she says in one of the typical Harvey one-liners of irony and sarcasm that pepper this 60 minute roller coaster of a one-woman show.
She is “ the mongrel born on the edge of hell “ but she makes the most of all the amazing opportunities that come her way – in Zurich, New York, London, Paris – lending ideas and inspiration to Andy Warhol for his idea of painting soup cans, suggesting a wall to keep people out to a young Trump and having relationships with the great and the greater – Jean Paul Sartre, the Dali Lama – even a red-haired British Prince.
It’s outrageous stuff – she is a monster- taking advantage of the Vietnam war to make a hit record about the iconic photo of the naked girl fleeing the flames .When Harvey or the Pet Shop Boys look like they’re on the verge of bad taste, Frances Barber , strutting the stage and belting out her life story takes them by the hand and firmly jumps over the precipice.
It’s a theatrical tour de force . Even at her mother’s death bed she doesn’t get the message when her mother begs her to stop singing. We shed tears but we are making tears of laughter and we know we shouldn’t.
If Billie is rude about her mother, she is vitriolic about her daughter BT – “ the personality of a frying pan and the forehead of a moose” she describes her.
Her love life is as much a battlefield as Hanoi – “ the most attractive men were tapping at my cat flap” she says in typical Billie bad taste.
After 10 years of living in a phone box in Soho Square , she is now in this show – not a one-woman show , she tells us – “ it’s open heart surgery “ And she somehow triumphs, leaving us wanting more with her defiant song “ You’ve got to live life for every moment “
The whole life story might be as much a fabrication as the photo-shopped back projections are with her standing next to the world’s top men. Harvey’s cleverness, and Frances Barber’s superb performance , in a frenetic staging by director Josh Seymour, is to make us care for this monster – and we do.
Musik is at the Leicester Square Theatre , London until 1 March – an absolute must-see here for more info or to book tickets
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