“If you can listen to Rebel Rebel and not be a tiny bit glad you’re alive,” the Irish writer Joseph O’Connor once claimed, “you’ve got an answering-machine for a heart”.
O’Connor was of course referring to David Bowie’s 1974 song, which provides the title of a new musical directed by Belgian theatre director Ivo van Hove. Based on the music of Bowie, the musical has recently finished a sold-out run as part of Germany’s Ruhrtriennale Festival.
A editor of the forthcomimg Cambridge Companion to David Bowie, it felt only right that I see Rebel Rebel, so I travelled to Bochum and excitedly took my seat for two consecutive nights. Judging from the audience reaction, this is a show that made many people feel more than a tiny bit glad that they are alive.
One of the play’s standout moments is a reworking of Bowie’s 1972 hit Starman. It begins as romantic duet between two of the show’s three main protagonists, identified as “Girl” (played by Ari Notartomaso) and “Boy” (Diego Rodriguez). From a love song beginning, this new Starman swells into a raw, joyous ensemble piece. As a chorus of 12 dancers, backed by a powerful live band, sings “let the children lose it, let the children use it”, a giant video screen displays footage of a child running through a field holding a toy plane, wishing it into an ascent that, of course, can never happen.
Van Hove knows that the joyous emotional musical push of Rebel Rebel (the song) also has a sombre literary and political background. Diamond Dogs, the 1974 Bowie album on which Bowie’s anthem first appeared, is loosely based on George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984. Bowie’s earliest concept for this album had been to create a musical based on 1984 but Sonia Orwell, Orwell’s widow, refused to give him the rights.
The action of Rebel Rebel takes place in a dystopian world where, as van Hove explains in the programme, “a top-down government orders that no one can have relationships. No connection is possible between people”. Along with creating such intense levels of repression, this government is is also delighted to let violent gangs roam the streets, terrorising an already suppressed population.
Within this world there are three main characters. As well as Girl and Boy (who very distantly echo Orwell’s thwarted lovers Julia and Winston), there is Gang Leader (Daniel Donskoy), who embodies the forces determined to annihilate them. Like Tony and Maria in West Side Story, a production of which van Hove directed in New York in 2020, Girl and Boy embody a drive towards desire, connection and peace in a world where powerful interests find violence and division much more expedient.
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Rebel Rebel’s publicity emphasises the show’s intensely collaborative nature. On the programme, van Hove’s name shares equal prominence with those of choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, musical director Henry Hey and set/lighting designer Jan Versweyveld. A fifth name – that of video designer Christopher Ash – could easily have been added.
“Genocide” is one of the first words uttered in Rebel Rebel and a persistently sombre aspect of the show’s visual presentation is the display, on a massive screen high at the back of the stage, of images of war-torn cityscapes.
While no names or specific locations are supplied and while the programme emphasised that “the piece doesn’t directly talk about the present”, it was very difficult to sit through Rebel Rebel’s two hours without thinking of real world parallels. But Rebel Rebel is also, for van Hove, “a story about hope”.
And most of that hope comes from Bowie’s music. There is very little dialogue. Nearly every word is sung and comes from a Bowie song, of which there are about 25 in all. Most of them are love songs and they come from different strands of Bowie’s career. There are some huge classics from the early and the later 1970s (the Berlin period is well-represented), all performed with physical energy, verbal clarity and vocal freshness. None of the three main singers ever – to their credit – attempt to sound like Bowie.
Nick Cave once wrote of the love song that it “must resonate with the susurration of sorrow, the tintinnabulation of grief” and – even though this show is full of genuinely joyous moments – Rebel Rebel always meets Cave’s requirement.
It does this in part because of the refreshing attention paid to words. Van Hove is, as Bowie was, a keen and attentive reader. “People talk about me as if I rip apart texts,” van Hove once said. “I don’t do that. I always start with the text.”
In a van Hove show – whether it is a production of an American classic like Arthur Miller’s All my Sons or an adaptation of Hanya Yanagihara’s novel A Little Life – words matter. Modern Love (1983), sung by Gang Leader, is performed with a clear-eyed sense of how its cheery beat is at odds with its misanthropic, shut-in, anti-romantic lyrics. The show also features songs from Bowie albums of the 1990s and the 2000s (Outside, Heathen, Reality, The Next Day) all of which are performed with emotional punch and some of which are beautifully, delicately rearranged.
Another standout moment is Slowburn, a song that first appeared on Bowie’s 2002 Heathen album. The forceful playing of Hey’s band combined with Rodriguez’s bell-clear singing worked compellingly well. Standing before a video screen-backdrop of fire and flame, Rodrigeuz delivered a performance which made Slowburn a song about heat, devastation and a sense of terror to which anyone who had lived through the suffocation and fires of summer 2026 could all too easily relate.
There is every reason to hope that this sold-out run in Bochum is only a beginning. Announcements of an international tour would make many theatregoers across Europe – and particularly in the UK, where Bowie’s legacy runs deepest – much more than a tiny bit glad.
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Denis Flannery does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.