Some people object to the naming of arts venues after money-men, but if anyone deserves such an accolade it is surely Lloyd Dorfman, whose Travelex company’s funding has done so much to lower ticket prices and sustain broad programming at the National Theatre in recent years. The former Cottesloe Theatre now bears his name, although on its reopening after some 20 months, little seems different. The front-of-house space has been revamped and expanded, but the theatre itself seems all but unchanged from its Cottesloe days, apart from some new seating… but not very much of it, because for this reopening presentation the stalls/floor level is seatless, leaving the majority of the audience to mill around as a series of rostra are combined and recombined to form playing areas.
    
This is the kind of wacky configuration that has almost worked here on several previous occasions such as the play Earthquakes In London. This time it does succeed, because the staging (by Alex Timbers) fits the material. Here Lies Love is a bio-musical about Imelda Marcos based on a 2010 concept album by David Byrne and Fatboy Slim (I’ll just give you a moment… OK, on we go), and this is more or less a re-creation of its staging at New York’s Public Theater just around the time the Cottesloe/Dorfman conversion began.
    
Norman Cook’s way with a big beat is appropriate to a figure such as la Marcos, who spent her evenings nightclubbing in New York or Paris while the Filipino police indulged in a different kind of clubbing in the service of her husband Ferdinand’s increasingly authoritarian and corrupt regime. Fatboy’s arrangements are characteristic of his musical approach which blends the feels of contemporary techno and classic disco. In this almost entirely sung-through 90-minute piece, Byrne’s lyrics too bear his trademark: light on rhyme, seldom memorable as such but masterly in their combination of directness and articulacy. Much of his work here involves found material, although I think he overplays the claim to verbatim on the final number, the only one with live and minimal instrumentation (and without that sometimes too pervasive Fatboy beat which powers through even the ballads), recounting the 1986 bloodless “People Power” revolution which unseated the Marcoses.
    
Before this, Imelda’s rise from poor beginnings to being, arguably, at times the power behind Marcos’s presidency is told with a brash, cavorting seductiveness, both onstage and in video clips on every available vertical surface. Natalie Mendoza’s Imelda gets a number about being both the people’s star and their slave, which puts her squarely in the mould of other political divas from Marie Antoinette to Eva Perón. Yet there is no acknowledgement that Marcos’s hands were bloodier on her own account than any of those others’. Byrne’s fascination with reproducing this kind of insidious charisma leaves us no space to consider it ourselves, to step back even for a moment and re-evaluate our responses. So, not really pushing the Manila envelope.
     
Written for the Financial Times.