★★★★

“Barber gives the character everything she has”

Jonathan Harvey and the Pet Shop Boys’ salacious, scandalous and searingly funny “Musik” is only an hour long, but it will take stage management twice as long each night to clear up all the celebrity names dropped. It’s a good thing, too, that we’re fully aware that this is a work of complete fiction (although we would love it to be all true) otherwise the libel lawyers would outnumber the paying audience. Mind you, my guess is that they’d be won over pretty rapidly by Frances Barber’s brilliant and hilarious delivery of Harvey’s script, that charts the outrageous life of a certain Billie Trix.

So, who is this Billie Trix? She was first introduced to the world in the 2001 musical, ‘Closer to Heaven’ as a retired rock icon and actress. Although the narrator, she had a relatively small part of the story. In 2019, Harvey and the Pet Shop Boys created “Musik”, the spin-off cabaret show that propelled Trix to centre stage, exploring her back story from her ignominious birth in war-torn Berlin to the present day. Not quite a ‘cradle-to-grave’ story, as she still manages to keep the latter at bay, against all the odds. Six songs pepper the narrative, opening with ‘Mongrel’. “Times were tough, but I was tougher…” she croons in her ravaged voice, “times were rough, but I was rougher”. Yet by the final song she is undeniably celebratory, belting out the fact that you’ve got to live your life for every moment (she certainly has). “We never know what’s round the corner” she says by way of introduction, “and that’s what gives me hope”.

And what corners she has turned, managing to find herself at the forefront of each revolution in pop culture; giving birth to the American folk revival, inventing ‘Disco’, inspiring Andy Warhol’s pop art culture, creating Madonna’s image and – in an update since its 2019 premier – unwittingly causing the global pandemic. She witnessed Vietnam, rejected the hand of a young Trump (good move), and got up to all graphically described shenanigans with the likes of Lou Reed, Andy Warhol, Jackson Pollock, Damien Hirst, Tracy Emin, Mick (and Bianca) Jagger, Frank Zappa, Shania Twain, Jean-Paul Sartre, even the Dalai Lama… I could go on. Trix is clearly delusional, and her memoir is fantastical. She is larger than life, arrogant, self-assured and psychotically callous and indifferent to opinion. But she is adorable, charismatic, and laugh-out-loud hilarious. Barber gives the character everything she has, bringing her to life and making her preposterous anecdotes totally believable… almost. With expert comic timing, Barber mixes over-the-top self-aggrandisement with dead-pan self-deprecation, conquering the stage and the audience with a performance Billie Trix could only dream of.

Terry Johnson directs the show with the pulsating pace of a Pet Shop Boys dance anthem. Barber talks and moves at 120bpm, seamlessly segueing into the musical numbers. The unmistakable Tennant and Lowe synth-pop backing does give a vague karaoke feel to the songs, but Barber’s crackling vocals adds the required depth, aided by Harvey’s and the duo’s scathingly clever lyrics. The songs are not necessarily what we’ll be taking home with us – it is Harvey’s razor-sharp writing, coupled with Barber’s fiercely formidable performance that will be truly remembered. Billie Trix insists that she is a ‘gift to the world’. A dubious claim. But there’s no doubting that Frances Barber is a gift to the theatre world. Her character is indomitable, her show unmissable.

THE WHITE CHIP

Southwark Playhouse Borough

★★★★

“There is a lot of fun to be had along the way in this remarkable piece”

There’s an old joke that has been doing the rounds for quite some time now, that goes something along the lines of ‘quitting alcohol is easy… I’ve done it hundreds of times’. It is a very apt phrase for Steven, the protagonist of Sean Daniels’ profoundly autobiographical play “The White Chip”. Steven has relapsed many times; the titular ‘white chip’ is a token given to a newcomer or somebody returning to an ‘Alcoholics Anonymous’ programme, signifying the beginning of a journey towards recovery and sobriety. There’s an obvious flippancy to the above one-liner, but like many jokes it is rooted in truth. Daniels knows that the best way to get a serious message across is to dress it up in fine humour, and in this respect, his play is the epitome of style. There are many laughs that, on close inspection, are dangerously close to the bone.

Steven tasted his first beer as a pre-teen. His first sip tasted terrible. The second wasn’t so bad, and by the third his love affair with booze began. Love affair? An abusive relationship. For much of his adult life Steven is a functioning alcoholic. He graduates, he creates a successful theatre company, gets married. He is riding high. In tandem, however, his marriage is on the rocks, he distances himself from his ailing parents, he loses his job. He is plunging low. We follow Steven through various trials, witnessing his tactics to keep his destructive drinking habit secret. Ed Coleman, as Steven, gets right to the core of the character, portraying him with striking realism. It is almost impossible to see where Daniels ends and Coleman begins – writer and actor becoming one and the same. Sentimentality is abandoned as Coleman recounts his tale, for the most part addressing the audience while at other times slipping into dialogue with the many people his tumultuous life affects. Mara Allen and Ashlee Irish take on these characters with brilliant and stylised multi-rolling: colleagues, drinking buddies and, with aching poignancy, the suffering parents. Allen’s portrayal of Steven’s mother – also a recovering alcoholic – is cutting and compassionate, extremely funny and ultimately moving.

But it is Coleman, with his chiselled physicality and expert hold on the text, that commands our attention. Daniels’ writing, which has the feel of an extended monologue, resonates with shades of a more family-friendly Hunter S. Thompson. Matt Ryan directs with a masterful eye on the essence of the piece. Allan and Irish continually orbit Coleman’s central character, pulling the anchor away from this desperate character, but eventually helping him find his moorings. Lee Newby’s stark set relies on simplicity: stacked chairs like a Manhattan skyline and a roving table are all that are needed to evoke the various locations, while Jamie Platt’s lighting throws us into the shadows of Steven’s mind only to repeatedly pull us into the glaring reality of his illness with the bright, cold lights of an AA meeting hall.

We learn a lot about the backstory, the lapsed Mormon background and thwarted ambitions. We gain little understanding, however, as to the reasons for Steven’s descent into dependency. But that is the fundamental point. The most common answer to the question of ‘how did it get this far?’ is invariably ‘I don’t know’. Daniels’ play makes no claims to address this. Instead, it addresses the fall out and, more importantly, the potential for recovery. Split into two halves, the balance favours the drinking days leaving us less time to appreciate the road to recovery. But Daniels makes that road more accessible, stripping away the barbed brambles of stigma. His brutal honesty and humour destroy any sense of shame. Fundamentally a true story, it is a heartfelt confession and, in a way, a love letter to those that helped him – in particular his own mother. At a crossroads in his life, Steven (and by extension Daniels) needs to make a decision to live or die. He calls his mother who steers him from the edge, keeps him on the phone for ten whole hours, and saves his life. Even if you haven’t come close to this sort of experience you cannot fail to be moved. But if you do relate to it personally in any fashion, it is authentically powerful, deeply moving and sad, yet steeped in hope.

There is a lot of fun to be had along the way in this remarkable piece, with affectionate jibes at religion and psychobabble. There is a slight tendency towards self-satisfaction towards the closing moments, but we can overlook that. “The White Chip” is a revelation. Intimate, honest, challenging, sensitive but funny too.

MUSIK

Wilton’s Music Hall

★★★★

“Barber gives the character everything she has”

MUSIK

Wilton’s Music Hall

Reviewed on 17th October 2025

by Jonathan Evans

Photography by Charlie Flint

Previously reviewed at this venue:

MUSIK

MUSIK

MUSIK

THE WHITE CHIP

Southwark Playhouse Borough

★★★★

“There is a lot of fun to be had along the way in this remarkable piece”

THE WHITE CHIP

Southwark Playhouse Borough

Reviewed on 15th July 2025

by Jonathan Evans

Photography by Danny Kaan

Last ten shows reviewed at Southwark Playhouse venues:

THE WHITE CHIP

THE WHITE CHIP

THE WHITE CHIP

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