Cabaret Auschwitz

As titles go this one is pretty much guaranteed to get your attention. However, those who go expecting something in even more bad taste than Springtime For Hitler in The Producers will be disappointed. This is serious attempt to explore the way people, especially artists, try to hang on to a sense of who they are in the most unimaginable and extreme circumstance.

It’s setting is Block 24 at the infamous Polish death camp, which was effectively a brothel “staffed” by selected prisoners to reward guards and even some prisoners. Tom (Barry Fitzgerald) is a gay inmate who also has to “serve”, and his character is the most compelling of the four prisoners we meet. The other three are Sadie Wilde’s louche and defiant lesbian Coco, Amy Butterworth’s poet and Gem Carmella’s Isle, a young Jewish girl who also has a twin sister in the camp on whom Mengele is conducting his despicable experiments. When she asks why she has been sent to block 24 but her sister to Mengele she is chillingly told, “you’re the control”. If (and when) her sister dies, she will be killed too as she will no longer have a function.

The piece is full of these startling reminders of what went on in those dark days and even darker places. The prisoners cope by staging (or rehearsing) a cabaret – this is encouraged by Kerry Howard’s prison guard. who was herself an actress. It’s a neat idea, but doesn’t really come off because the songs (by director/writer Tim Macavoy and MD Amy Butterworth) aren’t strong enough. The movement is particularly weak. The show’s one strong musical moment is a violin solo near the end from Butterworth – an adaptation of Jack Yellen’s A Yiddisher Mama.

Another problem is the plot, which I found confusing. I wasn’t sure whether I was watching a naturalistic presentation or something more Brechtian. At one point Isle comes into the audience and gets a rather trepidatious punter to pick a card and does a magic trick in an effort to explain some psychobabble about all of us having a doppelganger who we will meet and then die. As it was too dark in the audience to make out what cards we were looking at, it failed even at the level of being magic trick for me.

This piece has potential, especially with one or two better performers and songs, but it really doesn’t do justice here to the enormity of its subject matter. Still, it does manage to uncover a hidden and weird world and one gets a bit of the sense of how the human spirit can rise above almost anything. And what horrors there were to rise above. Some of the prisoners who worked in the brothel had to take several rough and filthy clients every day. The alternatives elsewhere in the camp being so horrific, many volunteered for the task.