My daughter Kit, who is both generous and astute, recently treated me to a wonderful show in the appropriately majestic His Majesty’s Theatre in Aberdeen. It was John van Druten’s Cabaret, excellently directed by Rufus Norris.
If you’ve never seen this amazing musical, you really should. Think wild, extravagant liberty with an undercurrent of the ironic and the sinister.
I marvelled at the witty sheer audacity of the first act. It portrays a glorious debauchery in the pre-war German Weimar Republic; and the subtle undercurrent of comic yet slightly less glorious poverty by the landlady Fraulein Schneider. However the pantheon of utterly sexually liberated, wildly choreographed dance highlighted by actor John Partridge’s nightclub emcee is truly what stole the show.
Act Two skilfully led us in an apparent blink of the eye to the comic character Herr Schultz’s pathos as he tries to make light of the Kristallnacht pogrom, seen in the background broken window of his shop front. It’s all too easy to overlook how it’s followed by his invisible disappearance.
Of course all is revealed as the American ingenue Cliff Bradshaw is first beaten up by the Nazis for speaking out, and then pleads with the nightclub dancer Sally Bowles to flee Nazi Germany. Then the moment we have all been waiting for, as she captures the muted lightness of supreme irony: ‘Life is a Cabaret, old chum.’
Like Schultz, Sally Bowles is determined to believe that Fascism ‘will all blow over;’ she rejects Bradshaw’s proffered railway ticket out of Berlin.
The genius of Rufus Norren’s direction is to transform the liberated full and barely partial nudity of Act One. In Act Two this nudity is transformed into the tortured denudation of naked, huddled and cowed bodies behind a backlit screen, as we hear the gas of the Final Solution killing Jewish Germans. And then the curtain falls.
But I’m struck by something even more deeply sinister than this, if that were possible. What I feel goes wrong in this production, and indeed the score itself, is the curtain-call reprise of the eponymous Cabaret tune with utter zest by the orchestra; the hiss of the gas chambers has been drowned out by the show stopping Cabaret number, already consigning it to (our consciousness’) oblivion. Could a muted and ironic reprise accompany the encores? Surely not; the applause is duly celebrating the gloriously riotous choreography of Act One’s cabaret act.
Yet Kit and I were too shaken to join in the standing ovation (with the whole house clapping along in time):
“Life is a Cabaret, old chum
Come to the Cabaret …”
More than anything, there was a sense of fun as the audience filed out.
Is this a failure, and the betrayal upon betrayal enacted for and by the audience?
Who knows?
The unknowable and crucial question is this. How many people went home and asked themselves, wait, had they been duped by a Cabaret themselves? – what in Hell had they clapped along to? – how many thought a glimpse of something sinister for us ‘will all blow over’ – and how many went home thinking happily ‘yes, old chum’ – life is, after all, let’s sing it, ‘Life is a Cabaret.’
And can we afford to think, right now or ever, that it is?
18 January 2020
Wow, Ruth, you write very powerfully and well. I’ve never seen Cabaret but it seems you and Kit “got it. “Maybe you should send this as a review to the Press and Journal.
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Thanks Sarah – that could be an idea!
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