A Marriage, Turned Into Epic Theater
· The Atlantic
If betrayal is a sin, the devil—Lily Allen knows—is in the details. Her fifth record, West End Girl, an excoriating concept album about the failure of her second marriage, was released with only four days’ notice last October, and in a flash seemed to imprint its specifics everywhere: the Duane Reade bag overflowing with sexual detritus, the discarded receipt detailing a ruinous gift for another woman, the suspicious conversation about vasectomies. Since Allen emerged onto the musical scene in 2006, a sleepy-eyed, chubby-cheeked 21-year-old with oversize gold hoops and Day-Glo attitude, she has married joyful melodies with jarring imagery, a modern-day Kurt Weill with a Myspace page. Her early song “LDN” blends the giddy vibe of a city on a sunny day with unsettling glimpses of urban blight. “When you look with your eyes, everything seems nice,” Allen sings, over a soaring Caribbean brass hook. “But if you look twice, you can see it’s all lies.”
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Before West End Girl, which she is set to perform live in its entirety at venues across the United States, Allen hadn’t released an album since 2018. When her name came up, it was often for something she’d said that the tabloids had pounced on, such as the fact that she’d taken to OnlyFans to sell pictures of her feet because doing so made her more money in a month than 8 million streams of her music on Spotify did. (“Don’t hate the player,” she told someone chiding her on X, “hate the game.”) This is the entrepreneurial state of modern celebrity in the 2020s: You might have a podcast, a book, a relationship with a fashion house, various stage and TV roles, your own line of high-end sex toys.
[Read: The art of airing your dirty laundry]
But when West End Girl arrived, as dazzling and destructive as a tactical missile, it affirmed that Allen’s most substantial gifts are as an artist. In the title track, she describes moving to New York after getting married (to the actor David Harbour), scoring the lead role in a play back in London, then finding herself floored by a phone call in which her spouse unexpectedly tells her he wants an open marriage. (Notably, regarding that phone call, we hear only her side—Harbour has commented only broadly on Allen’s account of their relationship, saying “pain, slip-ups, and mistakes” have been part of his life’s journey.)
The rest of the album plays out in spasms of controlled devastation. Allen sings about obsessively picturing her husband kissing someone else over a pounding EDM beat (“Ruminating”); she confronts another woman by text to the score of a Sergio Leone–style standoff (“Madeline”); she tries desperately to maintain her sobriety, her vocals numb and auto-tuned over a dreamy soundscape (“Relapse”). On “Pussy Palace,” Allen’s vocals topple down over a major chord as she portrays herself realizing exactly what her husband has really been using his empty apartment for. (“I always thought it was a dojo,” she sings, tragicomically.)
The first time I heard West End Girl, I felt knocked out. Not by a sense of exact personal recognition—“Woman Who Has Never Been Married or Cheated On Feeling Seen by New Lily Allen Album,” as the comedy site Reductress put it—but by gratitude for the record’s depth of feeling, its ruthless honesty, its narrative ambition. Allen tells a fully conceived and haunting story that begins with upheaval and ends with acceptance, dropping little bombs all the way through. On “Let You W/In,” the album’s penultimate track, she wrestles with why it matters to her to reveal so much about her life, and to potentially torch other people’s reputations along the way. “I’m expected to be nice / Picking up the pieces,” she sings. “What is it you sacrifice? I’m protecting you from your secrets.” She’ll be able to recover from the pain of her marriage, she senses, only if she’s able to transform it into something new. Her goal isn’t revenge so much as recovery. (“If I tell the story,” Nora Ephron wrote in Heartburn, “it doesn’t hurt as much.”)
The tour for West End Girl continues that project of metamorphosis. I saw the show at the London Palladium ahead of its journey across the U.S.; crowds of exhilarated and wined-up fans exploded when Allen emerged onstage in a pink tweed Valentino suit. The show is presented in two acts. In the first half, three cellists—named the Dallas Minor Trio, a play on the alias Allen apparently used on the celebrity dating app Raya—play her greatest hits. The second half is something between a live concert and a theatrical production. During Act I, the lyrics of songs including “Smile” and “The Fear” are projected onto a screen so that people can sing along in raucous interactive tribute. But Act II is all Allen. She doesn’t speak or address the crowd. She’s here to perform the new album straight through, and you get the sense that to break character would simply make it too hard to endure.
When Allen first steps onstage, her hair in a tight beehive, she’s alone on a shag carpet in front of velvet curtains, the stage empty apart from a rotary telephone. The aesthetic suggests 1970s social satire—part kitchen-sink realism, part Abigail’s Party. During “Ruminating,” Allen looks weary; she sings in front of projections of her own face, seemingly trapped in cycles of intrusive thought. Watching her perform her breakdown while thousands of people dance (the song is a bop) feels unnerving, but also intentional: The crowd’s discomfort as they sense the cognitive dissonance plays into the spectacle. (The production design is by Anna Fleischle, who also designed 2:22 A Ghost Story, the play Allen was cast in at the beginning of West End Girl—an eerie kind of circularity.)
After the first song, Allen removes her jacket; after the second, she steps out of her skirt. The undressing goes on until she’s wearing spectacles and a sheer negligee over underwear: think intellectual fembot. The stage behind her is slowly exposed, too, layer by layer, as the velvet curtains part to reveal a bedroom, which turns into a West Village apartment, and then a moodily lit kitchen. Before “Pussy Palace,” Allen disappears to change into burgundy hot pants and a blue lace body stocking, as if trying to recover some bravado, while projections of the New York City subway shimmer onstage. During “4chan Stan,” she wraps herself in a giant unfurling replica of receipts from her husband’s alleged purchases of gifts for other women, then winds an enormous piece of fabric covered in handwriting, presumably from those women, around her head and neck, seemingly suffocating herself with their words.
Early reviews of the show have ranged from rapturous to perplexed. The Guardian gave West End Girl live two stars out of five, assessing Allen’s performance as detached and listless; The Observer argued that Allen’s magnetism and fragility onstage revealed new dimensions to the songs. I found the production enthralling and audacious in how it turns her marriage into epic theater, fragmented and highly stylized. The cellists in Act I prime the audience for a boozy good time, a rip-roaring nostalgic sing-along, only to then become mired in a work of heartbreaking claustrophobia.
Allen’s decision, in the second half, to trap herself in different domestic settings onstage like a disconsolate Ibsen heroine, is haunting. If you’ve seen the viral Architectural Digest tour of her gorgeous Brooklyn dreamhouse, the brownstone “with four or five floors,” you know how wan and nervous she appears throughout, playing second fiddle to Harbour’s flirtations with the camera. Not any more. Recreating that home onstage every night only to dismantle it seems like an act of reclamation. Allen is center stage now, right where she belongs.