Cabaret

Michael Hayden & Anna Maxwell Martin in Cabaret

There's absolutely no point sitting alone in your room with Rufus Norris's revival of Cabaret newly opened to enflame debate—which it surely will. Brave, uncompromising, sometimes silly, and with an odd though in some ways understandable blank where its wounded and manic heart might be, Norris's 40th-anniversary production of the John Kander/Fred Ebb musical confirms the longstanding British penchant for putting the Broadway song-and-dance canon through a pretty wild wringer. Does it all work? By no means, and Anna Maxwell Martin's Sally Bowles proves problematic in separate but equal ways to Jane Horrocks' occupancy of the same part when London last staged this show, in 1993. But though I scoffed at pre-opening reports that Norris was planning an unusually dark Cabaret—hasn't this show always been dark?—the staging bears him out. By comparison, the earlier Sam Mendes version at the Donmar, which (extensively rethought) transferred to New York and ran for years, is a walk in the park, and Norris' final image, among others, will haunt me for years.

The intention, presumably, was to up this musical's stakes at every turn, often in as in-your-face a way as possible. And so we have dance from the Venezuelan choreographer Javier De Frutos that reconceives Berlin in the early years of the Nazis (the show is set in 1930/1) as an extended orgy, a party town on a writhing, nimble high that is about to come to a bruising halt. The first-act close, "Tomorrow Belongs To Me," for instance, celebrates the body beautiful with almost hymnal fervour—the number has rarely sounded more lyrical (or chilling)—the sight of a naked, indecently attractive company revisited at the end of the second act in an appalling, truly shocking tableau that absolutely serves Norris' point: more than I have ever encountered with Cabaret, one senses a populace fiddling (in every respect) while Berlin burns, a community of hedonists and solipsists for whom life really is an orgiastic cabaret.

James Dreyfus in Cabaret

It won't surprise you, then, to learn that beds are among the few essential props of Katrina Lindsay's fluid if rather severe design, a series of sliding geometric panels that cast a skewed visual eye on the cavorting going on beneath. Also central to her sets: various ladders, which both pay homage to the reining Kander and Ebb show of our time (namely, Chicago) while amplifying the circus environment in which Michael Hayden's visiting Pennsylvanian writer, Cliff Bradshaw, immerses himself, as our guide of sorts through the evening and, for a while, as Sally's roommate and lover. At times, De Frutos mistakes the cheeky for the puerile: "Two Ladies" staged with the help of a couple of flapping willys, as if to complement the penile acrobatics on view in Terry Johnson's recent Piano/Forte at the Royal Court. But when De Frutos isn't playing the self-conscious bad boy, the choreography serves our growing awareness of what Joe Masteroff's book tells us is a city given over to "a bunch of kids playing in their rooms getting wilder and wilder." And so they are seen to be.

It's Cliff's fate, of course, to be of this bunch and apart from it, succumbing to new realms of his sexuality and then beaten by the Nazis, whose accompanying cartwheels during the attack locate the violence by way of A Clockwork Orange. (That very British connection is there as well in the antic storm troopers in the concurrent revival of Bent, to cite just one other of the sudden spate of shows - let us not forget The Producers and, still to come, The Sound of Music - that pay a more than passing nod to the Nazis. And to lederhosen.) I didn't see Hayden's Cliff when he took over in the role on Broadway in the Mendes production. But the actor, an alumnus of Norris' short-lived Broadway Festen this past spring, gives real urgency to a potentially passive role, his moral enquiry resonating anew at a time—in London, and elsewhere—when overt anti-Semitism is strongly on the rise.

Sheila Hancock in Cabaret

The company boasts a second flat-out revelation in Sheila Hancock's Fraulein Schneider, whose numbers—beset as they are with rhetorical questions ("So What?", "What Would You Do?")—amplify a populace drifting toward the abyss, though in the case of Cliff's landlady not without some very real awareness of that fact. Her scenes with Geoffrey Hutchings' diminutive Herr Schultz are genuinely touching without being sentimental, and Hancock's somewhat sandpapery voice in itself evokes the Weillian era to which John Kander's music doffs a cap. Harriet Thorpe is at once voluptuous and forbidding as Fraulein Kost, while Andrew Maud cuts a deceptively genial figure as Ernst, the German in Cliff's immediate circle to most immediately embody the precepts in the tome that has been the American's bedtime reading: Mein Kampf.

What of the two leads? Interestingly, Norris's staging isn't defined by star turns, as befits an ensemble-driven director who has come to the West End via extensive work on London's tonier subsidised circuit (the National, Almeida, Royal Court, Young Vic). Singularly unfunny in the original London company of The Producers, James Dreyfus does something quite startling as the Emcee, banishing the memory of Alan Cumming just as Cumming, in turn, set Joel Grey to one side. A ubiquitously sour, joyless presence seen in (and out of) varying bits of body-hugging black, Dreyfus is first glimpsed through the oculus of the O in "Willkommen" that confronts the audience from the start; in performance terms, he is at his best in a smartly reimagined "Money Song"—the slender Emcee turned overstuffed glutton—and in "If You Could See Her," here staged as an eerie one-person duet between the Emcee and a snout-laden nemesis whom, tellingly, he cannot see. If Maxwell Martin's Sally can't quite find her footing amid such company, that has something to do with a singing voice which is loud but colourless and a freneticism that palls after a while. (One misses the bone-chilling stillness—a kind of ideological vacancy—with which Natasha Richardson shaded her Tony-winning Sally on Broadway.) Maxwell Martin has some good moments, not least humming "If You Could See Her," clearly oblivious to what the song actually means. But if she (right now, anyway) isn't anchoring the production, at least she's in the hands of a director who has taken a time-honoured musical and shaken it to its very troubling core.

Cabaret
Book by Joe Masteroff
Music by John Kander
Lyrics by Fred Ebb
Directed by Rufus Norris
Lyric Theatre