It's unfortunate for Katy Perry that her Prismatic tour is rolling into town just three weeks after Miley Cyrus's Bangerz. Cyrus's giddy, gaudy extravaganza has raised the bar for pop arena shows, whipping pop art, satire and tongue-in-cheek provocations into a breathless frenzy of entertainment. Perry, who is 29 and divorced, is no longer in a position to match Cyrus for madcap glee. Like her latest album Prism, released last October, Prismatic finds her trying to square the trashy vigour that made her famous with a new gravity that fits her like a lead boot.
When Perry rises from beneath the stage for opening song Roar, her hair scraped back into a tight black ponytail, her face hardened into a defiant scowl, she calls to mind Madonna during her Blond Ambition phase, only without the commanding charisma. Whether executing gruellingly choreographed dance routines or borne aloft by solemn slabs of beefcake dressed as glow-in-the-dark sci-fi gladiators, Perry seems subdued rather than empowered by the show's demands.
For Dark Horse, she reappears dressed as a Marvel Comics version of Cleopatra, astride what must be the world's most expensive pantomime horse. Having been recently criticised for tactless cultural appropriation, perhaps Perry decided that caricaturing ancient civilisations was the safest option, assuming that the ghost of Rameses II doesn't have a Tumblr account. The only spectators liable to be offended are those allergic to elephantine kitsch.
It's all quite impressive, especially when she dangles from a metal prism while the triangular video screens broadcast Death Star-like images during ET, but it's also pretty much humourless and Perry is lost without humour. Her debut single, I Kissed a Girl, an obnoxious trifle that only works at all if it's handled with a light touch, comes armed with grandstanding guitar solos. Hot N Cold is reframed as ersatz supper-club jazz, this being a tactic beloved of pop stars who wish to ruin their hits.
All the physical effort required by the show's opening blitzkrieg interferes with Perry's ability to sing every note live, creating dissonant moments when her voice continues to boom even when her lips aren't moving, but you don't come to a show like this and worry about the use of backing tracks. More pertinently, her exertions keep her from looking like she's having fun. Even when she grabs a moment to address the crowd she sounds shrill and tense. "Do you love yourself?" she demands, in the manner of a step aerobics instructor possessed by the spirit of Ayn Rand. "You have to love yourself!"
Perry is a warmer, goofier character than this suggests, so it comes as a relief when she slows down a bit. At the halfway point she dresses like a diaphanous flower child, strums her way through some ballads, rambles opaquely about her divorce from R****** B****, and gamely sips from a pint of London Pride donated by a fan, despite appearing to regard it as one step up from cyanide. "Down it! Down it!" chants the crowd. "I have a gluten intolerance," she protests. "Down it! Down it!"
Having dispatched with Stern Katy and Sensitive Katy, Perry devotes the rest of the show to the persona that suits her best, namely a boozy party planner in charge of a billionaire's hen night. Suddenly everything is lurid, silly and fast. Preceded by a medley of early 90s dance hits, the stage design for Walking on Air is what you'd get if you tried to mount a homage to the rave era with only old episodes of Pete Waterman's ITV show The Hitman and Her for reference. Sporting a bra consisting of two acid-house smiley faces, Perry performs This Is How We Do beneath an armada of parade-sized inflatables including one that looks very much like a smiling turd. She sings Birthday, Prism's most proudly ridiculous song, from the lap of a dazzled fan atop a rotating cake, before flying around the arena hanging from a bunch of balloons. At last the show feels like a mass celebration rather than an imposing spectacle.
Perry's identity crisis is only resolved during a solo encore of Firework, an EDM lung-buster which, as anyone who's seen Rust and Bone will know, can bear a surprising amount of emotional weight. Backed by as many fireworks as the O2's fire regulations will permit (more than you'd think), Perry looks both joyous and regal. Elsewhere, she is caught in the Stardust Memories conundrum: straining towards maturity at the expense of her earlier, funnier work.
