Sing For Your Life at the Vault Festival until March 8 2015.
It doesn’t happen often but sometimes a show comes along and prompts the honest response: I haven’t seen anything quite like that before. Such is the case with Sing For Your Life, a roadkill taxidermy cabaret musical on this week as part of Vault Festival in Waterloo. Novelty is no guarantee of quality, of course, and the show isn’t an unalloyed joy. But it’s on to something, and it’s definitely different.
Sing For Your Life is the creation of Charlie Tuesday Gates, a taxidermy artist who, the press bumph tells me, has created pieces for Elton John and Beyoncé. Gates has exhibited work at the Vaults gallery, a space that opened last year in a set of railway arches off Leake Street (aka my beloved graffiti tunnel), just across from where the Old Vic Tunnels used to be, and has since expanded to become an exciting live venue with a handful of performance spaces and a couple of bars. It was the home of both the Mimetic festival in November and its own six-week Vault Festival, which ends on Sunday; both buzzy, ambitious undertakings with an emphasis on non-traditional performance and a mini-Edinburgh feel.
The venue clearly likes Gates’s style: Sing For Your Life is the Vaults’ very first in-house production and applies elements of her art practice to a story that sits somewhere in between Pinocchio and Battleship Potemkin, with shades of Meet the Feebles and American Horror Story: Freak Show. Our hero is a literal underdog – a perky but neglected young pooch who finds himself drawn into a strange underground cabaret company comprising a badger, a fox, a cat, three chickens, four squirrels and a mink (I think). Short on punters but long on indignation and razzmatazz, they sing their struggle in a bid to recruit our hero to their liberationist cause.
The truly distinctive ingredient here is the puppetry itself. The characters are made out of the pelts of real dead animals – roadkill, former pets, bodies found online – which are then animated bunraku-style by visible on-stage performers who also provide their voices.
The effect is genuinely uncanny. The realness of the fur, paws and facial structures sits in queasy tension with cartoonish eyes and red-felt mouth linings, not to mention their anthropomorphised characterisation. They are inarguably there yet also not-there – a doublethink mode that aligns nicely with the show’s argument that humans’ relationship to animals is fundamentally hypocritical, treating them as exploitably present but ethically elsewhere. This effect is pushed into overdrive for a grotesque burlesque in which a character literally sheds her skin to perform as a figure of glistening viscera and musculature.
The sense of injustice is palpable and persuasive, specific in its details and wide-ranging in its implications. (It’s no surprise to learn that Gates is a vegan.) This sensibility is given free reign in the songs performed as part of the animals’ revue. The troupe’s sly badger leader reworks Cher’s Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down) in the key of culling, a chorus line of battery hens channel Britney’s I’m A Slave 4 U, and so on.
These numbers are realised with dynamism, humour and vim by director Kieron Vanstone, musical director Barnaby Southgate and the band’s four other musicians. Gates wrote the piece and performs alongside Madeline MacMahon, Nicholas Anscombe and Matthew Maguire, who brings to our underdog a charming yearning for approval that modulates nicely into pained outrage when he realises his genes have been inbred to buggery and his balls chopped off, yielding the rousing highlight of the night.
All the same, the show has its share of formal problems. The characters tend towards the dumb, the devious and the deluded, forestalling greater emotional connection. And it’s a shame that the actual puppetry isn’t more assured: a company like Flabbergast Theatre (of Boris & Sergey fame) could imbue this menagerie with and feral grace as well as vigour.
The show’s humour, meanwhile, is often too blunt or on the nose to connect or provoke. Things get off to a wobbly start with a snarky theatrical vignette, painting our hero’s owner and associates as obnoxious narcissistic urbanites (it might work better as an expository flashback). Lyrics such as “You show me off in a public place/But when we’re at home you shout in my face” rather rub our noses in it. And lame ‘cock’ and ‘pussy’ puns sound no less lame in animals’ mouths than humans’.
Clearly shock value is at the heart of the show – for good reason, as suggested above. But the use of a ‘street’ accent for a couple of lines or cymbals to accompany the mention of China and Japan just feel tasteless. Dubious as well is the garbled if not reactionary equivalence drawn between the fur trade and burlesque performance – a connection affirmed by not one but three sarcastic references to feminism.
Beyond burlesque, the show’s relationship to cabaret as a whole is ambiguous: Sing For Your Life is billed as a ‘cabaret musical’ and, within its theatrical world, it’s very much alive to the form’s power as a vehicle for expressing disenfranchisement and an engine of political change. And, as discussed, the musical numbers are the show’s strongest sequences. Yet it remains unwilling or unable to use the tools of cabaret itself: to engage directly with the audience at hand, to press home the correspondences between what happens in the room and what happens in the world. There’s no effort to engage the audience directly, to unlock the energy of collaboration. Indeed, at one point during this sold-out performance, we were told the house was empty – true, perhaps, in the world of the story but illustrative of the missed opportunity.
The show’s titular anthem contains the rousing summons: “Sing for cruelty, sing for pain,/Sing for the things that drive you insane”. The result is a powerful howl of injustice with a distinctive creativity and grotesque charm all its own. But how much more powerful if we could feel the fur – even, perhaps, join the pack?
Sing For Your Life is on as part of the Vault Festival at the Vaults, Leake Street, until Sunday March 8 2015. More info here.
