📰 Brechtfast in Bed – Article: Mar. 1982

Writer: Ian Penman (New Musical Express)

Date: March 6, 1982

Length: 5 min read

A sharp, cerebral, and darkly amused NME critique of David Bowie’s BBC performance in Baal — a moment where Bowie finally stops playing Bowie and steps fully into someone else’s skin.

Bowie sheds the pop mask to become Brecht’s drunken poet‑devil.

Ian Penman frames Baal as the first time Bowie truly disappears into a character — grimy, unshaven, wild‑eyed — a far cry from the polished alien of The Man Who Fell to Earth or the stiff aristocrat of Just a Gigolo. It is Bowie at his most anti‑spectacular, and perhaps his most complete.

📰 Key Highlights

• One‑page NME feature, March 6, 1982

• Written by Ian Penman for the “Dangerous Visions” column

• Analysis of Bowie’s BBC performance in Baal (directed by Alan Clarke)

• Contextual comparison to The Man Who Fell to Earth, Just a Gigolo, and The Elephant Man

• Explores Brecht’s first play and Bowie’s immersion into the role

• Frames Baal as Bowie’s most convincing acting performance to date

📰 Overview

In early 1982, David Bowie appeared in the BBC production of Bertolt Brecht’s Baal, directed by Alan Clarke. It was a stark, abrasive, and defiantly unglamorous piece — a world away from the polished pop persona audiences expected. NME’s Ian Penman seized on this moment as a turning point: Bowie, after years of playing versions of himself, finally surrendered to a character with no glamour, no mystique, and no safety net.

Penman situates Baal within Bowie’s acting history — the xerox‑alien brilliance of The Man Who Fell to Earth, the muddled misfire of Just a Gigolo, and the discipline of The Elephant Man. Baal, he argues, is something else entirely: a Brechtian anti‑spectacle where Bowie’s charisma is deliberately broken down, dirtied, and reassembled into something raw and unsettling.

📰 Source Details

Publication / Venue: New Musical Express

Date: March 6, 1982

Format: One‑page feature / critical essay

Provenance Notes: Verified from original print scans; part of the “Dangerous Visions” column.

📰 The Story

Penman opens by acknowledging Bowie’s “acting scars” — the familiar narrative of a pop star dabbling in cinema with mixed results. But Baal is different. Here, Bowie is not a star cameo or a stylised cipher; he is a filthy, drunken, violent poet, a creature of Brecht’s early imagination.

Brecht’s first play is described as “luxuriously scripted,” full of autobiographical itch and moral rot. Baal is a devil’s accomplice, a seducer, a brawler, a man who destroys everything he touches. Bowie leans into this with surprising commitment: unshaven, grimy, intense, and stripped of glamour.

Penman notes that the BBC production pivots around Bowie’s presence — the opening credits bulge with his name — yet the performance itself is anti‑Bowie. Clarke’s direction alternates between BBC costume drama and Brechtian rupture, creating a fractured, unsettling atmosphere.

The result, Penman argues, is Bowie’s most complete acting performance. Not because it is polished, but because it is broken — a perfect fit for Brecht’s broken theatre.

📰 Excerpt

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

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)

📰 Visual Archive

A full‑page NME layout featuring Bowie as Baal: ragged clothing, banjo in hand, wild‑eyed and unshaven — a stark portrait of Brechtian decay.

David Bowie as Baal — grimy, intense, and finally someone other than himself.

📰 Related Material

• Baal (BBC, 1982)

• The Elephant Man (Broadway, 1980–81)

• The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976)

📰 Closing Notes

Baal remains one of Bowie’s most fascinating detours — a moment where he abandoned the armour of persona and embraced the ugliness, humour, and brutality of Brecht. Penman’s review captures the shock of seeing Bowie not as a star, but as an actor.

#DavidBowie #Baal1982 #NME #IanPenman #Brecht #AlanClarke #ReleaseChronicle

📰 Sources

• New Musical Express, March 6, 1982

• BBC production notes for Baal

• Minimal provenance references from collector archives

📝 Copyright Notice

All magazine scans, photographs, and original text excerpts referenced in this entry remain the property of their respective copyright holders. This Chronicle entry is a transformative, non‑commercial archival summary created for historical documentation and educational reference. No ownership of the original material is claimed or implied.