Bowie took on many personas during his lifetime and played dozens of characters, but discovering the method behind his art was often an elusive task. One man who knew him best in his final days was Irish playwright Enda Walsh, who, along with director Ivo Van Hove, helped create Bowie’s masterful denouement, the musical Lazarus. Hot Press attended a Q & A with Enda Walsh to get an insight into the Thin White Duke in his final days.
“Sometimes you listen to music and it affects the rhythms and the atmosphere of what you’re trying to write,” opines Walsh, who admits that while Bowie’s music might not always have influenced him on a conscious level, he often found himself connecting with musical textures on an emotive plain.
This, as Question-Master Tony Clayton-Lea notes early on, may have been one of the reasons why Enda Walsh was handpicked by Bowie and his team to work on Lazarus. When asked by Bowie who were the best young writers of their generation, theatre producer Robert Fox simply replied with two words: “Enda Walsh.”
Contact was made, meetings were arranged, and a few weeks after Enda’s name was first mentioned, the playwright recalls meeting David Bowie for the first time and being told by him: “You were in my head for weeks,” to which the playwright quipped, “Jesus, you should try living in it!”
From there, a friendship began that was based primarily on a mutual meeting of minds. During his first interview with the iconic musician, where Bowie handed him four rough pages of work on Lazarus, Walsh remembers that they immediately began drifting off into abstract terms and ideas, leaving everyone else in the room bewildered. “We were both right on the same level with how to approach this play,” says Walsh. “We knew it didn’t need to be immediately accessible or have a strict narrative. We were more interested in elevating the idea of a narrative.”
Ideas were bandied about (on Skype, no less). Walsh recounts the numerous times that he would have Bowie’s image propped up on his computer screen and the singer would drift off into an idea for a song, pick up his guitar, and beginning playing something mid-conversation from a country away.
Guided by Clayton-Lea, Walsh untangles some of the complexities of Lazarus to an audience made up of avid and knowledgeable Bowie fans. “We described the work we were doing as ‘like making a weather report,’” Walsh remembers. “It was all rhythms and atmospheres that clashed together. There wasn’t necessarily much adherence to characters or plot because what we really wanted was to focus on the madness of the mind. Bowie said that we were ‘basically making a fever dream.’”
The context outside of the creation of the play ultimately became an important factor too, as Walsh recalls how Bowie told him that he was sick while rehearsals were still going on. “There wasn’t a sense that death was an imminent prospect or that he was panicking to get things done,” says Walsh. “He was just always thinking about making stuff even as his health declined. I remember he Skype’d me one day during a workshop on the musical from across the street and told me that he had cancer. He had no hair so didn’t want to go out to the public for fear that word might spread but he still wanted to be part of the workshop. So he had me stick a camera up during rehearsals so that he could watch all the actors and give advice. It was like he was like the Wizard of Oz behind the curtain!”
“We never actually spoke about him dying, as such,” recalls Walsh. “Conversations about dying took place through the work itself. Lazarus’ last speech in the musical about death seemed to resonate even more knowing what was coming next…”
We’re a hushed audience as the Irish playwright speaks about seeing Bowie for the last time before he shuffled off his mortal coil. Resolutely an artist until the end of his days, Walsh compares Bowie’s focus and determination to finish Blackstar and Lazarus as being like a dying a parent staying alive for their children before finally letting go.
In a brief Q & A with audience members after the discussion, Walsh stated that if he could go back he wouldn’t change a single thing about the musical. This, in itself, is a testament to how well the pair worked together and to the success of their artistic accomplishment. An insightful conversation, Walsh provided the perfect opening salvo to this year’s extensive David Bowie Festival.