The Art of The O2 Chaos: Lady Gaga MAYHEM Ball in London

When you see a show as huge and brilliant as Lady Gaga's MAYHEM in the Desert at Coachella, you assume you've seen the definitive version. But the show that stormed into The O2 Arena in London was something else entirely, a masterful adaptation. It took the same explosive, near-perfect DNA from the desert and expertly re-engineered it for the focused intensity of an arena. The contained space made every moment feel sharper, louder, and somehow, even more immersive. It was a performance meticulously designed for perfection, yet one that was haunted from the start by a chaotic counterpart unfolding on the floor.

At its heart is a career-defining conflict: the battle between 'Gaga', the enigmatic pop superstar, and 'Stefani', the human artist. The light versus the dark, the performer versus the person. The whole show is structured like a piece of narrative theatre, split into five acts with portentous, gothic titles like 'Of Velvet and Vice' and 'Every Chessboard Has Two Queens'. It’s a journey into the self, charting a violent conflict between Gaga's duelling personas that eventually resolves into a hard-won peace.

Lady Gaga (Photo Credit: Julian Dakdouk)

My own battle, however, began hours before the show, locked in a day-long struggle with the AXS website. It seemed convinced I was a reseller bot, forcing me to become an IT expert just to get past the queue, while the resellers were apparently having no trouble scooping up tickets that would reappear later at extortionate prices.

By some small miracle, I finally broke through and snagged three standard-price tickets right by the catwalk for a supposedly ‘sold-out’ show. The whole thing felt deeply suspect. When I asked at the box office where this sudden flood of good seats had come from, they just shrugged. Was it a fake sell-out? A cynical ploy to create hype? Or just staggering disorganisation? It’s the kind of mess the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has been investigating for years, and it’s especially frustrating when you see other artists, like Ariana Grande recently, actively fighting for their fans.

And the door times, 18:30 for a 19:30 show, weren't just an inconvenience. They were commercially ludicrous. You can’t get 20,000 people through security in an hour, let alone give them a chance to spend money at the bars or the merch stands. Unsurprisingly, the show finally started an hour late, as thousands of people were still trying to find their seats long after the supposed start time.

The experience begins long before the first note is played. The arena is transformed into an opera house with classical arias filling the space, setting a tone of high drama. On the vast screens flanking the stage, messages from fans are displayed. Celebrations of survival, powerful declarations of identity, and so much more. I was even thinking of proposing that way myself, but your loss, baby. Together, these messages create a collective ‘Voice of Mayhem’, immediately forging a powerful, communal bond amongst everyone present.

The show officially kicks off with the 'Manifesto of Mayhem', a dialogue between Gaga and her alter-ego, the 'Mistress of Mayhem', which lays out the central theme of 'duelling twins'. Then comes the entrance. Regal and menacing, Gaga appears as a 'gargantuan cake-topper' on a 25-foot, blood-red Tudor gown. This thing is a movable work of art, parting like theatre curtains to reveal her dancers trapped in a steel cage beneath its skirt.

Act I is just a relentless assault of what you'd call 'Euro-influenced bangers'. It starts with the TikTok-revitalised 'Bloody Mary' before exploding into the new anthem, 'Abracadabra', followed by a furious medley of 'Judas' and 'Aura'. The whole thing culminates in a stunning set-piece for 'Poker Face', where the stage becomes a life-sized chessboard for a battle between a red-clad Gaga and her white-clad doppelgänger. But just as the Mistress of Mayhem symbolically 'shot' her innocent counterpart on stage, another antagonist emerged on the floor. A Lady in Blue, a security guard, began her own nagging crusade, obsessed with a phantom wristband that didn't exist. Her demands, getting louder than Gaga's own singing, became a persistent, discordant note in an otherwise perfect symphony.

The second act is a descent into a macabre underworld. The tone shifts as Gaga performs 'Perfect Celebrity' and 'Disease' from inside a large, grave-like sandbox, cavorting with skeletal figures and her now-dead doppelgänger. A chilling metaphor for being consumed by your own image, ending with the alter-ego strangling Gaga in a moment of complete submission to her inner darkness. Then, during 'Paparazzi', she appears on chrome crutches which she bonded later for an enormous train attached to her dress lights up in rainbow colours as she’s dragged backward, fighting its pull. This transforms the original performance's commentary on the perils of fame into a more complex struggle against the very machine of celebrity and the LGBTQ+ iconography she champions that both elevates and entraps her.

The next act is pure chaotic possession. The choreography becomes frenetic as the 'blonde', innocent persona seems possessed by the dark energy of Mayhem. Emerging from a colossal skull, Gaga launches into the industrial stomp of 'Killah' and the quirky 'Zombieboy'. A unique highlight for London was the guest appearance of Wednesday cast members Emma Myers and Evie Templeton during 'The Dead Dance', reinforcing the show's gothic, Tim Burton-esque vibe.

As the song started and the crowd roared for the guest stars, my Lady in Blue approached me for the last time. It wasn’t a question anymore. I agreed to go with her to sort out whatever problem they’d invented, and that's when it all caught up to me. The stress, the confusion, the constant harassment. The world tilted, the music warped, and I collapsed.

On stage, Gaga’s 'The Dead Dance' began. On the floor, so did mine. The beat of the song became the soundtrack to me being dragged across the cold, hard floor like a broken doll. In the lyrics for 'Abracadabra', Gaga sings about a spell cast by a "lady dressed in red" where "you hear the last few words of your life." It felt like that.

This was the ultimate, tragic irony of the night. A show meticulously designed to explore the conflict between an artist's inner turmoil was undermined by an external chaos that created a real-life trauma. The masterful performance on stage became a distant soundtrack to a personal horror on the floor. A brilliant tragedy where the art was flawless, but the experience was anything but.