Theatre

The Velvet and Lace Revolution

Tilly Michell | Monday 10 January, 2011 12:51

Cabaret is back! Put on your glittery feather boas and sing it in a high falsetto from the city rooftops if you can can can! Yes ladies and gentleman; having stewed for years in the culty underbelly of the entertainment sector, the cabaret scene is finally sweeping into mainstream culture for an all singing, all dancing comeback. This year some of London’s biggest stages were gilded with a host of variety acts, ranging from Camille O’Sullivan – a darkly beautiful burlesque singer, who delights in becoming increasingly tipsy on stage whilst musing on the pleasures of melancholy; to ‘The Boy with Tape on his Face’; a stand up comedian who never says a word but derives humour from his own mix of classic farce and modern mime.

The recent surge in cabaret’s popularity has not come completely out of the blue; in fact this is a renaissance that has been brewing on the fringes of popular culture for a long time. But why has it broken through now? And what does its popularisation spell for the future of the theatre, and indeed for society at large?

Earlier in the week I spoke to Honey Wilde, a London based performer whose acts include a burlesque-themed impersonation of Margaret Thatcher, appropriately titled ‘The Lady IS for Turning’. I asked Ms Wilde what it was that marked out cabaret from other styles of theatrical entertainment. “Cabaret is an extremely personal form of artistic expression” she explained “it is flexible, intimate and almost wholly generated towards the audience. On top of this there is something dangerous about it. It can be subversive, challenging, frightening, sexy. It taps into the rawest aspects of the human experience, and ultimately provides a comment on the very notion of entertainment itself.”

These themes of subversion and social commentary make up an important part of cabaret culture, though they are often under-appreciated by those unfamiliar with the genre. At the Edinburgh Fringe Festival this August, Sally Stott, a critic working for The Scotsman, caused uproar after publishing an article that described the performers of Circus Burlesque as “miserable looking sex dolls adorned with the glazed expressions of porn stars.” The lack of understanding behind these comments had cabaret performers from across the Fringe marching through the city in protest; many brandishing banners which defiantly declared “pro-expression not anti-feminist!” and “Can’t a woman be both sexy and intelligent?” The article certainly struck a nerve with Honey who expresses her disbelief that a professional critic could so completely fail to recognise the complex, multidimensional nature of this provocative art form.

Despite strongly disagreeing with Stott’s opinions on burlesque, Honey acknowledges that raising such debate is exactly what a successful cabaret performance ought to do. “Cabaret doesn’t go in for popularity contests” she says wryly “it is not designed to have mass appeal. We belong on the edges of entertainment, that’s what gives us the freedom to expose something genuine, that’s how we challenge the expectations of the social norm.”

The idea of revelation is perhaps one of the most compelling aspects of modern cabaret. Operating somewhere between spectacle and confessional theatre, a good cabaret performer will often expose a very real part of themselves on stage.

The magnificent avant guard artist Meow Meow, titillating begins every show by telling the crowd “look, I’m real, I’m not a screen, you can touch me.” These simple words alone are enough to thrill a modern audience. Perhaps as a society we have become so disaffected by over-edited, pre-packaged television entertainment that we have forgotten what its like to be in arms reach of a living, breathing, unpredictable performer.

The other side of this authentic exposure is that, by sharing themselves so brazenly on stage, cabaret performers offer their audience the chance to freely express a part of their own identity in public; be it through laughter, tears, heckles or song. In my opinion, it is this promise of social catharsis that is responsible for the current rise of cabaret in the theatre market.

Looking back through history it becomes brazenly clear that in times of rapid socio-economic change, the public choose cabaret as their favourite means of communal release. The genre thrived in the underground bars of broken, post war Berlin, and blossomed in the poverty stricken, bohemian culture of 19th century Paris, becoming hugely popular in 1920’s America, when the events of the Great Depression forced the glitzy world of high class entertainment together with the bluesy notes of the African American Jazz scene.

Likewise, in our own times of financial insecurity and sleazy coalition government, when the young have been driven to the streets in protest, and the Duchess of Cornwall herself was poked by a stick on her way to the opera, it is easy to see why society has once again taken cabaret to its heart.

The only question is; can a performance style that depends so heavily on intimacy work on a larger scale? “I don’t know” muses Honey, “part of me feels that cabaret will never fit into the mainstream. If an act becomes too big, the performer can loose their connection with the audience. And if that connection is lost then it ceases to be cabaret. I like to be able to see my audience, I like to be able to move amongst them and touch them”

It’s a contentious issue, and one that has the community divided. Personally I am inclined to agree with Honey, there is something un-daunting and familial about a small venue which doesn’t often translate to larger auditoriums. But this is a universal problem, one which all live artists contend with and must find ways to overcome.

Performing recently at the Lyric on Shaftesbury Avenue, Frisky and Mannish (the self styled ‘twisted pop-cabaret duo’ whose bitchy musical parodies have earned them a huge following of hairstyle-aping fans) got their audience playing party games in the theatre aisles in order to break any lingering feelings of impersonality or West End stuffiness. Passing a balloon between my legs to a complete stranger amidst the velvet seating and chandeliers of the Lyric felt wonderful, and proved that sometimes putting cabaret on a large, grandiose stage can be the ultimate form of meta-theatrical subversion.

Whatever the future has in store for the cabaret renaissance, I aim to make the most of it. With its gaudy mix of light-hearted spectacle and intellectual exhibitionism, cabaret can be used to expose political truths or to shut them out, to empower the performer or to strip them bare. One of the most versatile and unpredictable of all art forms, it is liberating, beautiful and, above all, real.

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