Blogs about the nature of cabaret for Exeunt and WhatsOnStage
This Friday it’s the second edition of Come With Me If You Want To Live, the quarterly cabaret show I’m producing and presenting for Chelsea Theatre. The last one was a belter – we had to turn people away! – and this one should be every bit as good.
By way of plugging it, I’ve written guest blogs for a couple of online theatre publications of somewhat different stripes. They’re about different things but both trying to get at elements of what makes cabaret cabaret – what’s unique and distinctive about it as a form.
WhatsOnStage takes a broadly traditional approach to coverage, focusing on West End and other more or less mainstream productions (though it’s certainly open to all kinds of performance). For them, I wrote a piece about the frisson of cabaret – why it’s all about delivering the kind of excitement and uncertainty that rarely comes in conventional, fourth-wall theatre unless something’s gone wrong. This is the opening paragraph:
This century’s London cabaret boom arguably rivals those of Paris, Berlin and New York. Each of those has become associated with a distinctive act: the frilly eroticism of the can-can girl, the satirical sangfroid of the androgynous MC and the street-smart yearning of the sultry chanteuse respectively. It’s hard to say what the defining image of London’s current scene might be – one of its greatest strengths is its voracious embrace of everything from burlesque to live art, circus to alternative drag. Read the whole article here.
Exeunt takes a more alternative, even radical approach – it’s intensely interested in interrogating what theatre is and can be today, and similarly questions what criticism is and should be about. For them, I wrote a piece about the word ‘cabaret’ and why its origins are still, to me, an invaluable way of getting at its unique character. This is the opening paragraph:
What is cabaret, anyway? It’s a question I’m often asked when I tell people it’s something I spend a lot of time watching and writing about. I never know quite what to say but my usual answer is that it depends who you ask. One of the things I love about cabaret is how protean and wrigglesome it is as a form, how difficult to pin down to any categorical definition. It’s a very broad, very deconsecrated church in which preachers, pilgrims and sinners of every stripe can find a nook or nave to suit their ends. Read the whole article here.
And QX magazine interviewed me about the thinking behind Come With Me. I still find it a bit odd to be interviewed (not that it’s happened often!) and should probably work on my soundbite technique… but very grateful to QX, as I am to Exeunt and WhatsOnStage, for being interested in the show. The Q&A touches on some broader issues around arts in troubled times and my own background as well as Come With Me itself. Read the whole interview here.
And of course if you fancy coming along on Friday, get your tickets here.
