Maxine Peake as Nico in The Nico Project (Photograph by Jon Shard)

The Nico Project, a performance piece created by Maxine Peake and Sarah Frankcom, focuses on the construction of The Marble Index’s psychic landscape. Peake, sporting Nico’s signature fringe cut, prowled around the stage in a trenchcoat and boots. She fretfully picked through Nico’s memories and recited fragments in her Northern English accent before she was slowly encircled by the apparitions of teenaged girls in Hitler Youth garb. Like Andy Serkis’s Gollum, she choked and spluttered on painful recollections, which made for uncomfortable viewing, as Nico’s trademark German drawl finally possessed her.

Composer Anna Clyne’s bewitching arrangements of ‘No One Is There’ and ‘Frozen Warnings’ were served well by frantic violin, rich cello, and kettle drums, played by students from the Royal Northern College of Music (RNCM) and local musicians Holly Downes, Lucy Price, Sng Yiang Shan, and Rebecca Tilley.

At just under an hour in duration, The Nico Project felt like the prologue to a more substantial work. Those who aren’t privy to the complexities of Nico’s darkness may question why the girls were dressed as Hitler Youth and why she began yelling ‘I am going to tell everyone about what happened to me!’ towards the end of the show.

Nico, born Christa Päffgen in 1938, spent her early childhood sheltering from bombs in a Berlin she described as ‘a desert of bricks’. The closing song of The Nico Project, ‘Nibelungen’, is an elegy to her mythic homeland on fire. She sings: ‘Shrieking city sun shiver in my veins / In flames I run / In flames I run / Waiting for the sign to come.’ Parts of her solo work are tinged with this longing for a mythical, pre-Christian Germany. In the 1970s she returned to Berlin and caused a riot when she sang a version of the German national anthem, ‘Das Lied der Deutschen’, with verses that were omitted in 1945 for their associations with Nazi ideology. According to her former manager and friend Danny Fields, Nico often made anti-Semitic remarks and was dropped from Island Records after they learnt that ‘she didn’t like Negroes’ and that they reminded her of animals. Fields also recounted an incident at the Chelsea Hotel in the early 1970s when Nico, sitting with a group of musicians that included a mixed-race female singer, suddenly yelled ‘I hate black people’, smashed a wineglass on the table, and stuck it in the girl’s eye, resulting in ‘lots of blood and screaming’. Nico was spirited away by her associates to an exile of sorts in Paris.

Maxine Peake as Nico in The Nico Project (Photograph by Joseph Lynn)

There has been much discourse recently about whether we should celebrate the art of ‘problematic’ or ‘monstrous’ artists – such discussions are outside the scope of this review. In Nico’s case, matters are complicated when we learn that at the age of fifteen, while temping at a US Air Force base, she was raped by an African-American sergeant who was then court-martialled and executed. While this horrifying incident and her other experiences during World War II aren’t justifications for her violent racism, they are possibly root causes and cannot be ignored. In her final years, Nico abandoned herself to heroin as a means of self-medication. She told her ex-bandmate James Young – who wrote about his experiences with the troubled star in Nico, The Songs They Never Play On the Radio (1992) – ‘all the bad things you’ve done …  all the bad things that happened to you … It comes back … like a riot … the heroin calms me down.’ It may never be known whether she counted glassing a black woman among the ‘bad things’ she had done.

At the climax of The Nico Project, Peake writhes rapturously to a hypnotic, thunderous rendition of ‘Evening of Light’. She stands before a floodlight and stretches her arms upward, her silhouette like a demonic bat or the black eagle on the Bundesdienstflagge. As Michael LaPoint writes in The Paris Review: ‘The more I read about Nico, the more she resembles the blackened Berlin ruins’.

The Nico Project is showing at the Playhouse Theatre as part of the Melbourne International Arts Festival, and continues until 19 October 2019. Performance attended: October 12.