Lady Gaga, London review: astonishing spectacle meets baggy jumper authenticity
Lady Gaga, London review: ★★★★★
You’re drawn from raw intimacy to megawatt theatrical spectacle in Lady Gaga’s textured 02 return
You might not have thought about Lady Gaga for a while. Despite her sixth LP Mayhem becoming the best-selling LP of 2025 thus far, her last cultural cut-through moment comparable to the heights of 2008’s The Fame or 2011’s Born This Way was arguably Rain On Me, the club-ready banger from 2020 lowdown album Chromatica. Radio friendly pop has moved on, replaced by the edgier dance anthems of Charli XCX – but if she is a brat, Gaga has always had something of substance to say, and at last night’s opening night at The 02, hers was a textured sermon where anthemic pop opera clashed with raw, stripped-back authenticity.
The first two thirds of the Mayhem show is a dazzling pop opera spectacle. There’s a skull a third the size of The 02 stage, Gaga in a dress the length of the catwalk (must be 70 odd metres), and her writhing in a sandpit alongside skeletons coming back from the dead. At one point she battles a queen from a chessboard, a metaphor for her past artistic selves, and she enters while pirouetting in a 30-foot-high ballgown she disappears within mid-vocal.
Lady Gaga at The 02: she’s most radical when she runs back on stage in a baggy hoodie
It’s totally overstimulating, and she knows that, ripping the Gothic staging away for an a capella sing-a-long around the piano, performing ballads A Million Reasons and Die With A Smile before a stripped-back version of The Edge of Glory from 2011’s Born This Way. You crave more of these sermons amid the glossy set pieces. You believe her when she promises to busk on the streets in 20 years if that’s the only stage she can find, though it’s one of a rare few musings: perhaps because she was an hour late and overran, with reported fees going up to £10,000 for every minute past 11pm.
The show opens with Mayhem hits Perfect Celebrity, Abracadabra and Garden of Eden, before she leverages the hits. If Paparazzi , Applause and LoveGame are par for the course, it was the first time Gaga, real name Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta, had performed speechless since 2017. Bad Romance and Born This Way endure as the best ear worms while Poker Face and Just Dance nourish as nostalgia.
The props and stagings are great fun, but she’s most radical and arresting when she’s stripped back. Ahead of the finale Gaga is seen via a live video stream removing makeup backstage. She comes on in a baggy jumper for How Bad Do U Want Me, hugging every one of her backing dancers before occupying the whole stage alone for a final wave. Like at the theatre, she is an artist taking her curtain, and here we briefly meet the real Gaga. The set pieces are great and all, but it’s thrilling to meet the artist — if only briefly. She never dreamed of standing there in a baggy jumper, so with a final wave, she’s gone, back to fantasise about serenading another corpse.
Lady Gaga plays The 02 this evening, and Thursday 2 and Saturday 4 October