Cabaret

It’s not so much spring time for Hitler as autumn for Hitler in the West End: hard on the heels of Martin Sherman’s Bent now comes Cabaret, the first of two Nazi-era musicals heading to London. But next to the soft-centred The Sound of Music that follows in November, director Rufus Norris has done something jolting and confrontational with Cabaret and that’s to re-establish the dark, stark theatrical credentials of a 1966 Broadway classic that has long been overshadowed by the flamboyant Fosse film version from 1972.

In short, Norris makes a real drama out of a crisis, as the rise of Nazism in thirties Berlin is reflected through the prism of a raunchy cabaret club, presided over by the seedy Emcee of James Dreyfus and the needy star singer of Anna Maxwell Martin’s Sally Bowles. She and Michael Hayden’s aspiring gay novelist Clifford Bradshaw develop a relationship of sorts when she gatecrashes the boarding house he is staying at.

The glinting darkness of the fantasies being indulged in the shadowy club world is brilliantly contrasted with the grittier reality of the house of Sheila Hancock’s Fraulein Schneider, populated by busy working prostitutes such as Harriet Thorpe’s Fraulein Kost and the earnest Jewish fruitseller of Geoffrey Hutchings’ Herr Schultz, who falls in love with the landlady.

Norris makes all the competing dramas being played out here register with an effortless and ultimately heartbreaking ease, dovetailing into and out of the mordantly tuneful commentary being provided by Kander and Ebb’s jaggedly atmospheric Weimar-cabaret inflected score (brassily played by an onstage band) and Javier de Frutos’ choreography that is aggressively revealing (in every sense).

The emphasis is always on the gritty rather than the glamorous and the production is sensationally served by a cast who act first rather than sing brilliantly. Martin is a perfectly marvellous Sally, funny and vulnerable and astringent and Hayden is appropriately tentative as the closeted writer, while Hancock’s Fraulein Schneider and Hutchings’ Schultz make a deeply moving pair of older lovers.

This is a fearless, frank production that magnificently renews a classic musical.