Troubadour Wembley Park theatre, London
Updated with references to net zero, the 1984 musical is back on track in all its outlandish glory

What bald-faced audacity led Andrew Lloyd Webber to conceive a show featuring the lives – and loves – of train carriages that sing their way through a nocturnal track-race while on roller-skates? Is Starlight Express the most outlandish musical ever to grace the stage?

It certainly seems so as it rumbles back from its bay after four decades in a bigger, camper and more preposterously OTT revival than its 1984 original, though the most confounding question is how this bizarre juggernaut of a show pulls it off in spite of it all.

Political art helps us debate and confront the challenges in our lives. It is also a record we must return to again and again

‘A play should be an act of moral imagination,” said the late British playwright Edward Bond, who died three months ago and who, in his lifetime, spoke about theatre’s absolute right to address the most difficult issues of its day.

Perhaps a revival ought to be an act of moral imagination, too. So I found myself thinking this week while I watched a verbatim drama from 2005 at the Old Red Lion theatre in north London, amid a packed audience. My Name Is Rachel Corrie is about the 23-year-old American who travelled to the Gaza Strip in 2003 to aid Palestinians living under occupation and was killed by an Israeli bulldozer.

Park theatre, London
A doctor, a therapist and the Kennedy brothers are among the characters in this cocktail of facts and fiction

Marilyn Monroe died on 4 August 1962 from a “probable suicide”. But was it in fact foul play? And was Bobby Kennedy present that night? Who knows. The only certainty is that Monroe, in her afterlife, hovers on the astral plane – a vulnerable blonde bombshell whose death has been linked to conspiracy theories involving the CIA, the mafia and politically motivated assassination.

Writers Vicki McKellar and Guy Masterson blend a cocktail of facts with fiction, and an overarching theory that friends and associates of Monroe (Genevieve Gaunt) were part of a cover-up.