John Caird’s stylish production McQueen about the late celebrated fashion designer Lee ‘Alexander’ McQueen, which premiered earlier this year to sell-out audiences at London’s St James Theatre, began its West End run at the Theatre Royal Haymarket last week.
Coinciding with the fifth anniversary of the designer’s death, James Phillips study is not a ‘bio-play’ wrote Fiona Mountford in her Evening Standard review.” The trippy action unfolds over one long night of the soul somewhere very near the end of McQueen’s troubled, high-achieving life.” Considered one of the most innovative designers of his generation, the ‘tortured genius’ hung himself with his favourite brown belt in 2010. The Guardian’s Michael Billington described the production as “primarily an act of worship, a secular hymn to a famous iconoclast who tragically died young at the age of 40.” The critic also wrote, “An excellent lead performance by Stephen Wight…with good support from Tracy-Ann Oberman,” as McQueen’s mentor Isabella Bow, who bought his entire 1992 graduation collection and persuaded him to use his middle name Alexander for his own fashion label. She committed suicide in 2007.
Savage Beauty – a retrospective exhibition of McQueen’s work finished this month at the Victoria & Albert Museum.
I met both Stephen and Tracy-Ann going in for last Saturday’s matinee and they were more than happy to sign this sketch.
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