The V&A’s Diva begins, like all exhibitions staged in its costume galleries, in sepulchral gloom. Even as the ears fill with the sound of a beautiful voice – visitors are given headsets, and first up on the soundtrack is Maria Callas, in Bellini’s Norma, recorded at La Scala in 1954 – the eyes struggle to adjust to the dark. In a way, it’s perfect. This show, sold out on the day I visited, is as much about performance as it is about pan-sticked individuals and their healthy egos. The space has, if you like, been transformed into a kind of theatre, the house lights down, the curtain about to go up. Squinting in the murk, you prepare yourself for drama: for sequined headdresses and feather boas, for dressing room riders as long as your arm.
Derived from the Italian for goddess, the term diva has a long history, its beginnings in the 16th century, when female performers first emerged from all-male actor troupes to transfix audiences. It wasn’t, however, until the early 19th century, when Donizetti, Rossini et al began composing operas with outsized roles for sopranos, that crowds began to grasp that while all divas were virtuosos, not all virtuosos were divas – and that the designation was the public’s alone to award. (Pop star Annie Lennox, who makes an appearance later in the exhibition, called her 1992 solo album Diva – a boast that only underlines the fact that, in most people’s minds, she’s no such thing.) Singers such as Jenny Lind (1820-87), AKA the Swedish nightingale, and Adelina Patti (1843-1919), the first performer to be described in print as a diva, were worshipped across Europe not only for their ability to perform bel canto, but for their uncommon charisma and the spell they cast on their besotted fans.
The exhibition begins with these women – here are portraits, magazine articles and stage costumes – and some of their sassier successors: Nellie Melba (1861-1931), the Australian soprano who had her own permanent dressing room at the Royal Opera House, famously copyrighted her stage name. Ahead are actors Ellen Terry and Sarah Bernhardt, dancers Josephine Baker and Isadora Duncan, and music hall turn Marie Lloyd. And around the corner, we find a constellation of movie stars: Clara Bow, Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Elizabeth Taylor, Mae West. Slowly, you begin to see that Diva’s curator, Kate Bailey, has chosen to interpret the word diva in its widest sense.
But if it may be applied, as it is here, to all manner of performers, it has pejorative connotations as well as laudatory ones. While this show is for the most part a celebration – the only possible response to seeing the white silk-satin dress worn by Mae West in her 1933 hit I’m No Angel is a broad smile – it’s also interested in the darker side of the diva: in the all-encompassing fame that can destroy peace of mind; in the way that a desire for agency by a female star is inevitably read as her being difficult and demanding. Among the glitter, tragedy is lurking.
All this is juicy fun: as sparkly a roll call as you’ll find in a grand art institution. I love All About Eve (1950), the greatest film ever made about fame and its vicissitudes, and it’s thrilling to stand in front of the distinctive silk faille dress worn by Bette Davis when she played the ageing Broadway star Margo Channing (designed by Edith Head, winner of a record eight Oscars for costume design, it’s the colour of dried blood). It’s also interesting: fact-filled as well as flouncy. I’m not sure Marie Lloyd can be described as a diva – do divas lend their support, as she did, to striking co-workers? – but it’s fascinating to see her engagement book for London’s Oxford music hall between 1908 and 1918, her wages easily eclipsing those of her peers. When Lloyd died in 1922 – by the end, she was an alcoholic – the crowd that gathered to watch her funeral procession was 100,000-strong.
Act two, upstairs, is called “reclaiming the diva”, and its theme is empowerment: since the 1960s, we’re told, the word diva has been used by people “of all genders” as an expression of art and self. I disagree with some of Bailey’s nominations here. Whatever else they are, Billie Eilish and Janelle Monáe haven’t done nearly enough yet to earn diva spurs; Sade’s smoky professionalism and Siouxsie Sioux’s suburban rebellion are different modes altogether, I think. Divadom, as the case of Amy Winehouse reveals, is at once highly self-conscious and utterly oblivious, and too many of Bailey’s names are working the notion ruthlessly, for entirely commercial reasons. But at least her rubric gives her an excuse to display the costume worn by Elton John for his 50th birthday in 1997: a Louis XIV-inspired number designed by another Oscar winner, Sandy Powell, that comes with a vast wig on which there sails a silver galleon. Ahoy there, you absolute monarch.
It’s almost too much, the high-octane glamour. The dresses worn by Cher (pheasant feathers for the MGM Grand in Las Vegas) and Lady Gaga (rivers of silk by Valentino); by Rihanna (a silvery coat and – yes – mitre by John Galliano) and Tina Turner (Bob Mackie’s showstopping flame dress from 1977). Each must have been dazzling on stage, or even on the red carpet. But in glass cases they’re the definition of flimsy – and not only because some skim the body so daringly. Displayed like this, they strike you as the opposite of liberation, as restrictive as cages in their way. Artifice is their only point. To live by these rules – every outfit a statement, every outing a performance – is also to die by them. It must be exhausting. Like Sade, you find yourself longing suddenly for a black polo neck, and the quiet obscurity of the British countryside.
Diva is at the V&A, London, until 7 April 2024.
