For our wedding anniversary recently we went to see Cabaret at the Playhouse Theatre. It was expensive as West End shows are these days but it was a great show.
The theatre has been taken over and given a make over into a cabaret club in the 1930s. The audience enters by the stage door and goes down along corridors until you reach a bar with a dancer performing. The next thing you come to is the front of house bar and there are about 8 performers in skimpy costumes dancing on the bar, playing instruments, singing and giving it socks. They are an extra to the show and build the atmosphere.
Then you enter the auditorium and what an extraordinary job they have done in transforming it. Gone is the proscenium arch. Instead is another banked circle of seats at the back of the stage and in the centre of all this is a circular stage surrounded by tables with little lamps. You can pay to sit there and have a meal before the show but at £500 a throw that’s a no from us.
The story is about the tenants of a run down part of Berlin and the nightclub provides a crossover in the storytelling. There is no pretence at realism. For instance a character in a scene at the nightclub becomes a coat hook in the next scene. But the characters are totally believable. They survive hard times through ingenuity, wit and humour. The world has made them tough and in 30s Berlin even harder times are around the corner. We grow to care for these people and their tangled relationships. When one of the characters, a dealer of smuggled perfumes whips off his coat to reveal a bright red swastika on his sleeve you could feel the chill running through the audience. It went very quiet.
In the second act the good humour and joy of the first act turns into something darker even scary. The revolving stage eventually turns them all into puppets of the state wearing similar suits. The final solo from Sally Bowles played by Marisha Wallace has an emotional heft that would break your heart. Her audience is all around her hanging on every word as she spurts out Life is a Cabaret almost as the only thing she has left against a cruel world forcing evil upon her. I don’t think I’ll ever forget that.
Powerful and a reminder that the theatre is a place we can go to remind ourselves of who we are and what we do to others. The cost to others of our decisions and our kindness or lack of it.
And what fantastic performers, band, costumes, staging and lighting it was. Truly great total theatre. And thankfully we didn’t have to go out of the stage door.
Themes
Theatretrain Artistic Director Kevin Dowsett introduces the new annual theme, Dreams and Realities. Exploring the fascinating space between imagination and the everyday world, Kevin reflects on how theatre creates manufactured realities, dreamlike moments and sudden comic interruptions. With stories from West Side Story and the original London production, he considers how this rich and versatile theme could inspire Theatretrain companies when the new term begins in September.
