Page - 82 - in Siting Futurity - The “Feel Good” Tactical Radicalism of Contemporary Culture in and around Vienna

82 siting futurity ated alcoholic. The story resonated with Bowie as it came at the end of his drug-addled American period, after which he fled for the healing anonymity and productivity of Berlin. As Dene October notes in his reading of what he calls the Bowie-Newton matrix, “[p]laying the role had a profound effect upon him, one he felt more intensely than with his other characters, like he was outering ‘a spirit within’ […], an identity that crystalized in the artwork to the albums Station to Station and Low, re-emerged in the Thin White Duke, and again, much later, in work that reflects back on his life” (October 2019, 107). When a liver cancer diagnosis forced him to confront the certainty of death, Bowie chose to revisit the unhappy, immor- tal alien he had so uncannily embodied in the 1970s, who had wanted to die but could not. Lazarus, his first and only musi- cal, on which he collaborated with Irish playwright Enda Walsh, picks up the story where the film left off, finds a derelict, gin- soaked Newton in his Manhattan apartment slowly going out of his mind and follows his interactions with a number of char- acters who may or may not be figments of his imagination. Its debut on December 7, 2015, in the New York Theater Workshop in New York’s East Village, was Bowie’s last public appearance before his death the following month, on January 10, 2016, two days after his sixty-ninth birthday. To the great surprise of many, including Lazarus’s German translator Peter Torberg, it has not been on English-language stages but rather on German-language ones that Lazarus has taken off. Of the first dozen productions of Lazarus, only the first two, in New York and London, were not in German. Af- ter playing in New York until January 20, 2016 and at London’s King Cross Theatre from November 8, 2016 to January 22, 2017,2 Lazarus saw its German premiere on February 3, 2018 at the 2 One of the London performances was filmed and screened for one night only in New York on May 2, 2018.