Eddie Redmayne and Jessie Buckley thrill and chill in sensational Cabaret

Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club

Formerly the Playhouse Theatre, London

From the moment Eddie Redmayne’s superb Emcee launches into his opening number, this Cabaret announces itself as an outstanding piece of theatre. “Willkommen, bienvenue, welcome,” he purrs, fixing the audience clustered around the circular stage with a rippling, lascivious smile. It’s an invitation to come and play: an entrée to a world that begins by seducing you and ends by chilling your blood.

In his novel Goodbye to Berlin, the source for the celebrated 1966 musical (by John Kander, Fred Ebb and Joe Masteroff), Christopher Isherwood describes Weimar Berlin as “the end of the world” and that is what Rebecca Frecknall’s stunning, revelatory production gives us. Together with designer Tom Scutt, she has reconfigured the Playhouse Theatre into the infamous Kit Kat Club, immersing us in the seedy sensuality of late 1920s Berlin, a place thrumming with sinister shadows.

We reach the nightclub through a series of subterranean passageways and bunkers — past scantily clad, hollow-eyed dancers who cast twisted shadows on the walls behind them — to emerge in a blue-green arena, flecked with gold and lit by low table lamps. It’s like stepping back into an exotic, hidden world and into the dark, stylised vision of the artists of the time. It feels clandestine, the audience gazing at one another as the stage revolves, parading a febrile, hedonistic world as it begins to disintegrate.

The whole experience is tantalising but unnerving: you feel voyeuristic and complicit. And that’s the point. Frecknall and Scutt place us with Cliff, Isherwood’s semi-autobiographical American character, as witnesses to the slow, insidious grip of Nazism on a threadbare society and to the stark warnings about the smiling face of fascism.

Omari Douglas’s lovely, naive Cliff is at first bewitched by the permissive world he has stumbled into, charmed by a sophisticated gent on the train who softens him up for a spot of smuggling and introduces him to the Kit Kat Club. Once he’s in, he’s involved: trafficking documents to make his rent; becoming roommate to nightclub singer Sally Bowles. The character is sketchy, but Douglas still deftly charts his shift into deep unease as the temperature changes around him.

Frecknall bleeds the worlds of the story into one another: the impoverished boarding house where landlady and lodgers struggle to make ends meet; the sensual escapism of the nightclub. The gender-fluid group of dancers defy disapproval as they clamber through the audience and gyrate suggestively. But there’s a brittle edge and assertive eroticism to Julia Cheng’s spiky choreography from the outset that speaks of fear and that gradually becomes more pronounced.

Tiny details chronicle the creeping changes: the Emcee’s gauntlets, high kicks that become goose-steps, camiknickers replaced by lederhosen. And for all the posturing, the most sexually charged moment on stage is when landlady Fraulein Schneider tenderly inserts a pineapple, given to her by her hesitant Jewish suitor, into a paper bag.

Superbly, scarily physical, Redmayne’s Emcee is the dark soul of this lost place. A Mephistophelian character, a slippery revenant, he shapeshifts constantly: a capering satyr; a sinister clown; a ghastly, angular skeleton with strings of pearls for ribs and a stormtrooper’s helmet for a skull. But he is at his most terrifying in his guise as a clean-cut Aryan in a dun three-piece suit and at his most chilling warbling the cod-patriotic song “Tomorrow Belongs to Me”.

Jessie Buckley, meanwhile, gives a career-defining performance as Sally Bowles: raw, desolate, defiant. This Sally is obstinately unsentimental and pragmatic with her gin and her pick-me-ups — a realist and a survivor in a tough world. But her vulnerability pokes through and her solos trace a harrowing inner journey. “Maybe This Time”, delivered partly in whisper, is spellbinding, revealing a fragile sliver of hope, and her game-changing “Cabaret” rips away all expectations of cheery resilience.

Draped in the Emcee’s jacket, face bruised, eyes deadened, she begins sullen and cynical and ends in a searing howl of rage and despair. It’s like watching someone break down before you: an astonishing, haunting rendition.

And at the heart of the production are Liza Sadovy’s warm-hearted Fraulein Schneider and Elliot Levey’s gentle Herr Schultz, whose tentative, late-blossoming love is crushed by anti-Semitism. Her heartfelt song “What Would You Do?” is chilling.

Finally, the party gives way to the Party and the dancers, now kitted out in sombre suits, line up stiffly on the slowly revolving stage — identikit denizens of hell. It’s a sensational production, only overshadowed by the eye-watering cost of the top-price tickets.

★★★★★

Booking to October 1 2022, kitkat.club

Trouble in Mind

National Theatre, London

We’re backstage again in Alice Childress’s Trouble in Mind, this time in a turbulent and racially divided US. Written in 1955, Childress’s play creates a vivid picture of the world of showbusiness as it was for African-American actors; in Nancy Medina’s excellent, timely revival, it speaks to an industry still struggling to achieve equality and to retain representation in the pandemic-impacted landscape.

As the play begins, a mixed cast of performers drift into a rehearsal space, ready to come to grips with a new piece of writing. There’s a lovely sense of anticipation about Medina’s staging and Rajha Shakiry’s set: a swagged curtain hangs over an empty stage, actors gather and gossip, a doorman bustles about, coffee is ordered, scripts rustled, anecdotes repeated.

But there are storm clouds too. Tanya Moodie’s Wiletta, an old hand, warns rookie John (Daniel Adeosun) about the best way to conduct himself as a black artist in a white-dominated business. Play the stereotypes they expect to see, she advises him: act dumber than you are and laugh at jokes even when they’re not funny.

Once everyone is assembled, we see her advice in action, not least from Cyril Nri’s anxious-to-please Sheldon, who echoes and applauds Mr Manners, the overbearing white director, at every turn. The crisp comedy of the exchanges has the tang of authenticity — Childress, as a black playwright and actor, was writing from experience — but as the action unfolds, the mood shifts.

The play they are set to rehearse, a groundbreaking drama about a lynching, has been written and directed by white men. Rory Keenan’s Manners begins by throwing his weight about, bullying the doorman, harassing his assistant (Joe Bannister) and manhandling the young ingénue, Judy (Emma Canning).

But soon he is combining portentous speeches about the significance of the production with rehearsal practices that edge into abuse. And when Wiletta stands up to him, questioning the motivation and behaviour of her character, tensions boil over. “You’re great until you think,” he tells her. Meanwhile Nri’s Sheldon, the only person in the room to have seen a lynching, describes what happened, uniting the cast and the audience in horrified silence.

Though often funny, Childress’s play is angry and sobering: so many lines, written 66 years ago, could have been coined yesterday (not least the white director protesting his lack of privilege: “I’ve never been handed any gifts”). The questions still feel live: is it all right to compromise in order to get a work staged? How do you protest and still pay the rent?

It’s also full of fine performances. Nri and Naana Agyei-Ampadu as Millie bring out the comedy and pain of their enforced compromises as black actors. And Moodie excels as Wiletta, giving us a beautifully drawn portrait of a highly intelligent woman forced to compromise and finally bursting out of the box to tell it how it is. In tone, it’s nothing like Cabaret, but here again is showbusiness, acting as a prism of the times.

★★★★☆

To January 29, nationaltheatre.org.uk