Theatre

‘Tell me how you’re going to sacrifice your life for the human race?’ asks groupie Helena of Jackie, the drug-addled popular-music icon whom she takes for the son of God. As Jackie sinks into heroin-induced solipsism, his manager, Barbara, manoeuvres him between promotional engagements. A money-grabbing suit, Barbara spends her time chopping into an increasingly huge mountain of cocaine. Though she decries the influence of adoring junkie Helena, she’s hardly the ideal candidate to save Jackie either.

Multi-tasking Christopher Hanvey writes, directs (with Kieran Sheehan) and takes the lead in this passionate, transgressive meditation on fame. His tattoos and pierced nipple are impressive, but there’s a distinct lack of enigmatic rock-star charisma about Hanvey’s Jackie – a name that, somewhat distractingly, more readily conjures images of the classic girls’ magazine than of a rock icon on the edge.

Though there are elements of black comedy and ironic undercutting, this play takes itself mighty seriously. If it didn’t, it would hardly be able to achieve the fine delirium that Hanvey and his fellow performers (the excellent Jessica Hrabowsky and Nicola Stuart-Hall) whip up in the later sequences. But all this romantic self-mythologising, in which deep significance and the capacity for transcendence are taken for granted, may leave you thirsting for a Brechtian cultural-materialist critique of the star-making process, or at the very least a little bit more self-mockery. After all, it’s only rock ’n’ roll.