"Mad" is one of the more annoying adjectives regularly flung at strong female pop presences. That Lady Gaga – she's bonkers, you know. The habit defies genre. Kate Bush, Grace Jones, Björk: all "mad". The gurning, lubricious, pneumatic Nicki Minaj is no stranger to accusations of being a few hair extensions short of a full head. Minaj recently turned up at an awards ceremony shod in boots made entirely of miniature teddy bears. As with Gaga, Minaj's visual weirdness is just one strategy in a highly effective marketing plan, and quite the opposite of mad. But Minaj does something properly nuts on her second night at London's Hammersmith Apollo.
During one of the set's chat breaks, she holds an extended, imagined phone conversation with one of her alter egos, Martha. Martha speaks in something approaching a British accent, like a camper version of Dick Van Dyke, a voice that Minaj says she's been practising since she was six years old. When, fluttering a union flag, she expresses her thrill at finally playing in London, you buy it.
Anyone else openly conversing with the voices in their head would be sedated and carted off. But this highly partisan crowd hang on Minaj's – and "Martha"'s – every word. "Martha" is, of course, the fictional mother of Roman Zolanski, another one of Minaj's alter egos, whose furious rapping lights up Roman's Revenge, the set's blistering opening track. Here's the rub: "Martha" is unable to attend tonight's gig. Not because she doesn't actually exist, but because she's having "a fucking mani-pedi".
Would that the rest of the night's show were so eccentric. Although so often compared to Lady Gaga, the rapper has more than a bit of Katy Perry in her, a kind of psychedelic childishness that somehow coexists with highly sexualised song content. At her best, Minaj is a fantastical cartoon creation, a computer-enhanced version of a rapper. But this production has feet of clay. With a less than impressive stage set, and half a dozen lengthy costume changes in which her witless DJ is forced to make small talk, Minaj's production isn't a patch on Perry's last fantasia in this same venue last year. It will probably be a different story when she upgrades to arenas in the autumn.
It becomes tiresome, pointing out what a sublime rapper Minaj is, and what a merely effective pop siren. Did It On 'Em and I Am Your Leader are classic braggadocio flows, in which Minaj proclaims her verbal dominance first in lavatorial, then in menacing style. After the fierceness comes a flurry of rave-pop heroics – Moment 4 Life, Starships – in which Minaj's transition from being the only female rapper around to a chart all-rounder is a fait accompli. She is far better company over an hour and a quarter than she was during her truncated set at Radio 1's Hackney Weekend. But somehow you leave having expected more hip-hop and less balladry. The gossip of the night isn't even anything to do with Minaj. Amy Winehouse's goddaughter Dionne Bromfield is caught stepping out with the Wanted's Nathan Sykes, who spends the gig's longueurs posing for pictures.
A kind of unholy madness grips John Dee, a figure we would now describe as a Renaissance man. A gifted 16th-century mathematician and astronomer, responsible for many of the advances in navigation that enabled Britain's fleet to discover new lands, he became fatally enmeshed in the pursuit of astrology, alchemy and an attempt to decode the language of the angels. Dee is the fascinating subject of Damon Albarn's second opera, Dr Dee, a follow-up to his Mandarin-lyric Monkey: Journey to the West. The original libretto was to be written with comic artist and occultist Alan Moore, who has since published his unfinished manuscript in a journal. Suffice to say, Moore's version focuses more on magick and sexuality, while Albarn and director Rufus Norris's production blends dance, live crows and a particularly mobile bed to tell Dee's tale.
Classical opera relies on the audience's intimate familiarity with the text. New work has to try harder to make itself understood. One major downside to this second, more accomplished coming of Dr Dee – premiered last year at Manchester's international festival – is the sense of bewilderment the opera can't help but engender, in the absence of a libretto or surtitles. Owning the album helps a bit, but significant passages of song are not part of the tracklisting. Albarn, though, is a constant, hovering presence. He, drummer Tony Allen, kora player Mamadou Diabaté and a band of players hang above the action, voicing subtle connections between Elizabethan lute music and African forms. The sounds on offer throughout two hours also span Albarn's lovelier acoustic numbers and more conventionally operatic versifying. Sonically it's brave but effective, especially during a passage in which the Spirit (Melanie Pappenheim) seems to sing birdsong backwards.
The plot, meanwhile, pares Dee's complicated life to an assimilable morality play. It's basically Doctor Faustus all over again, with the added twist that the tale of Faustus was probably inspired by Dee. Dee, played by the rather anonymous Paul Hilton, rises to renown. Chosen to chart a suitable coronation date for Elizabeth I, he later throws his lot in with occultist Edward Kelley – played as an unctuous presence by countertenor Christopher Robson. They become increasingly obsessed with communing with angels. One angel tells Kelley he really should sleep with Dee's wife, Jane (Clemmie Sveaas). Perdition ensues.
There's a surprising physicality here which makes up for the bewilderment; the interplay of period detail and computer graphics are further saving graces. Crow-headed dancers telegraph the arrival of the fearsome Walsingham, played deliciously as a baddy by baritone Steven Page, his stature emphasised by stilts. Books make like giant Slinkies, pouring their knowledge out into the young Dee's mind, before becoming moving screens behind which the action shifts with swift stagecraft. The planets and astrological data are projected over the action; weird symbols fly past a little like the hard maths in Darren Aronofsky's 1998 film, Pi.
There are thematic nods to Englishness that sometimes misfire, as when morris dancers and punks parade along tokenistically at the start. After so much portentousness, too, it's almost a relief when the crows steal the show at the end, in an unscripted tussle over a treat.
