Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

One foot on the catwalk

Plus: a semi-good, semi-wonky biographical play of Alexander McQueen at St James Theatre

issue 30 May 2015

St James Theatre hosts a new play about Alexander McQueen (real name Lee), whose star flashed briefly across the fashion world before his suicide in 2010. It opens with a mysterious stalker, Dahlia, breaking into McQueen’s Mayfair home and demanding that he make her a dress. ‘I’m calling the police,’ he shrieks but she placates him and they embark on a surreal odyssey to his childhood haunts where they meet his mentors past and present. A pretty clunky start. Who is Dahlia? A dramatic ploy, a figment of McQueen’s imagination or a real person? We don’t know so we don’t care about their relationship. Still less about her flipping dress. Every word that she prattles, and she prattles a lot of them, descends like rainfall downstream of a hydro-electric plant.

McQueen is the powerhouse here and the best details take a good while to emerge.

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