I must have seen the 1972 film Cabaret 30 times. I’ve watched it with people who didn’t like musicals, a guy who thought Liza Minnelli looked like a duck (who I no longer speak to), children so young that I started off trying to explain the Weimar aesthetic, only to realise partway through this that I’d first have to tell them who Hitler was. Yet, I had never seen it on stage, and by the time the current West End production opened, assumed I probably wouldn’t, being opposed in principle to super-expensive tickets. It’s a weird objection. I’m in favour of performers at the apex of their game being paid a lot, and I strongly support the live arts breaking even. I just can’t spend £200 on a thing that lasts such a short time.
Mr Z finally persuaded me with a PowerPoint presentation plotting units of human enjoyment against number of birthday presents it could represent. By the time the night rolled around, I was so completely won over to the enterprise that I stepped out in a mink stole belonging to Mr Z’s great-great-aunt. The 12-year-old disapproves of fur, of course, but I made the case that it was over 100 years old, so whichever way you sliced it, those minks would definitely no longer be alive.
It was the night of one of Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak’s debates. So, as Truss was parading her new scheme to create hyperinflation – telling the world that it would all be fine, because she would be in charge and she believed in Britain – I was watching Money, Money. You’ll recall the lyrics, of course: “When you haven’t any shoes on your feet/ And your coat’s thin as paper/ And you look thirty pounds underweight.”
It used to seem so historical, that song. Imagine that, kids, times so lean that even the bohemian classes were hungry and couldn’t afford shoes. Imagine inequality so fierce that some people had yachts while others literally perished from hardship. I really did not envisage a time when we would simply be calling that “autumn”.
There are things I had forgotten about Cabaret, or maybe I just never joined the dots. So much of that proto-fascist skirmishing was played out in sex, a visceral Nazi disgust for permissiveness, deviance, androgyny, homosexuality – met and rebutted by a vividly experimental cabaret class that was having sex on stage when, maybe, it should have been community organising.
The choreography, by the way, is unbelievably hot. I genuinely couldn’t tell you which of the dancers was male and which female. Then in the interval, there was nearly a toilet riot in real life. The loos had been unisexed in a really ambiguous way, the result of which was that all the young women were using both toilets, and washing their hands opposite urinals, and all the old women were in a really long queue and very angry, and all the men were apologising, to everyone.
When they performed the death-drive anthem, Tomorrow Belongs to Me, I honestly started crying, not because of this specific story, but rather because it makes you think of a more generalised, inexorable cascade into destruction and how, once you have noticed it, it’s too late to stop it.
In the second half, they get a few audience members on stage to do a makeshift, 1930s conga, and they chose me, I guess because of the fur, and my mood flipped abruptly from despair to reckless excitement, which is, I imagine, why progressives of yore were cabareting instead of organising. I was also a bit drunk by then. It’s a risky old game for the cast, figuring out who in the audience is drunk enough to get on stage, but not so drunk that they mess it up. Mr Z thinks they probably learn it on a course.
“Did you enjoy it?” he asked at the end, and on the one hand the answer was very simple, yes – it was the best thing I have ever seen on stage, or probably anywhere. But on the other hand, imagine if your favourite film was The Deer Hunter, and someone took you to a live version, except it was in Vietnam, and you were with your real best friend, with a real gun, and the bullets were real, and so were the rats. You’d have to wonder, did I really want something quite so immersive?
• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
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