Cabaret

The cultural inferno from which the original cabarets emerged, was fuelled by a potent mix of sex, drugs and politics. Seismic shifts in post World War I European culture, riots, strikes, unemployment, rampant crime, and also inflation colluded with some of the most innovative philosophical movements of the twentieth century to create an unforgettable amalgam of street-wise, intellectual, and high camp brilliance.

“The Golden Twenties” as they have since been dubbed, saw Berlin attract everyone from atomic scientists such as Einstein, to classical composers like Ravel. Even dancers fleeing the Russian Revolution such as Pavlova, went straight to Berlin where they interacted with the radical architects of the Bauhaus, the painters of Expressionism, the antics of the Dadaists, and the new nudity embraced by such outre performers as Anita Berber and Josephine Baker. Marlene Deitrich was in fact discovered while performing in a cabaret by Joseph Von Sternberg who cast her as the sexually dangerous Lola in the legendary film The Blue Angel in 1929.

The cabarets attracted people from all quarters of society, from the nouveau riche to the threadbare poets, from pimps to transsexuals, drug addicts to political activists. Without the traditional restraints and censorship of the Kaiser’s Germany, which had been swept away in the aftermath of World War I, Berlin was probably more permissive than most cities today. Cocaine was cheap and freely available. The economy was in tatters, and many people knew terrible privation. But despite rampant inflation, the arts flourished in a spectacular fashion. Faced with a world of ferocious uncertainty, Berliners embraced the arts. Both jazz and classical music flourished. Painters and writers not only flouted convention, they questioned all forms of authority. And from the stage the acerbic wit of the cabaret “conferenciers” (the masters of ceremony) found much to satirise in the raging storms of political extremism. When a Nazi shouted “dirty Jew” Wemer Finck, working from the stage of the fashionable left wing cabaret Der Katakombe, shouted back: “I’m afraid you are mistaken, I only look this intelligent.” His boldness marked the era, but it was not to last.

Perhaps it was the danger and instability of the period which inspired so many artists to challenge their society, but “The Golden Twenties” were to give way to a much darker and even more violent decade. The far Right and Left battled it out on the streets and in the ballot boxes. Hitler, and the Nazi party were able to exploit the very insecurity which had made Germany open up to the currents of Modernism. And the worldwide depression heralded by the American stock market crash of 1929 was to crush every vestige of the once-glittering playground of Twenties Berlin within the space of a few years. It is to this marvellous and toxic era that Sally Bowles and the other firebrands of CABARET belonged, and to this era that Mendes has returned them. It is a musical which has so much more depth and political resonance than is usual in the genre, and yet that probably explains why it has continued to evolve in the decades since the last curtain in the last Weimar cabaret came down. The wit, courage and sparkle of the characters transcends the tragic end which awaits them, and inspires each new generation to “Come see the CABARET!”.