March 6, 1982 - New Musical Express

BRECHTFAST IN BED

IN Baal, David Bowie finally shed his skin and played the part of someone else.

The analysis of his past acting scars you've heard before. Nicolas Roeg used him successfully as a brightly altered xerox image in The Man Who Fell To Earth, and something or other happened in Just A Gigolo, an atrocity that only really deserved mumbled lines. Perhaps the disciplinary experience of Broadway's six-month run for The Elephant Man has purified Bowie, or perhaps he just got fed up playing dopes a

Bowie is still not entirely free of Bowie (although he probably never will be), for Baal pivots around the character Baal, and Alan Clarke's BBC production pivots equally around the fact that all four of them are bound up together. The opening credits bulge with DAVID BOWIE, and it is clear that the unearthing of this relatively obscure little play is occasioned not by a particularly strong urge to recondition or recontextualise Brecht, nor to plunge an old artefact into contemporary appetites - as was recently the case (and a pretty anti-climactic one) with Arthur Schnitzler's La Ronde. There's nothing much controversial or topical about Baal-it's all pinned down perfectly well, a satisfying but inherently safe academic exercise.

Baal was Brecht's first play, and whilst lacking the suggestive scope of later work is still luxuriously scripted. The devil's helpmate Baal has all the best lines -some of them improbably well enunciated for a character who is meant to be a death's door alcoholic wretch-and the autobiography is always an irresistible itch just beneath the surface, as is usually the case with an author's first dive into literary work. Clarke (who directed Scum) alternates between standard BBC costume drama and a