Theatre review: Cabaret

PREVIEW DISCLAIMER: This is another one with a long preview period, and the official reviews aren't out yet.

Rebecca Frecknall had a career-defining hit with Summer and Smoke, which she's capitalised on creatively with her ongoing associate role at the Almeida; now she makes a bold play to capitalise on it commercially as well, staking her claim as a name we could be seeing in the West End for some time: A reimagined production of Kander & Ebb's dark but enduring musical Cabaret, with not only a big-name cast but also a reconfigured Playhouse Theatre that tries to give the feeling of entering the eponymous Kit Kat Club in 1920s Berlin. With staggered entry times, the audience enters the theatre's basement and is guided around the dingy corridors, passing showgirls doing their makeup until eventually ending up at front of house to find their seats*. Once inside Tom Scutt's traverse design has replaced the Stalls seats with tables surrounding a raised revolve.

Theatre review: Flowers of the Forest

Both written and set in 1934, as the consequences of Hitler's ascent started to become apparent, John Van Druten's pacifist drama Flowers of the Forest looks with some concern at the increasing possibility of a Second World War, by looking back to the First. Naomi (Sophie Ward) lives in London with her well-off husband Lewis (Mark Straker,) their lives largely revolving around books and art. Many of their generation still hold onto the romanticised view of World War I as a noble sacrifice, but the couple are among those who view it as a pointless and ruthless waste of life. So when Lewis' secretary Beryl (Victoria Rigby) reveals her boyfriend contributed to a new book exposing the horrors of the front, he's invited to meet them. Leonard's (Max Wilson) enthusiasm for his subject, as well as some papers from her recently-deceased father's house, set Naomi off remembering her relationship with a doomed war poet, and the play's middle act flashes back to her childhood home in 1914 and 1916.

Theatre review: London Wall

John Van Druten's London Wall is an ensemble comedy-drama set in a solicitor's office, casting a particular eye on what working life was like for women in the 1930s. Office manager Mr Brewer (Alex Robertson) has tried his luck with most of the typists - currently he's got his eye on newcomer Pat (Maia Alexander,) who doesn't heed the warnings of Miss Janus (Alix Dunmore.) 35 and engaged for 7 years to a foreign diplomat who seems to have lost interest, Miss Janus herself is afraid of becoming an old maid and being stuck in this low-paying job all her life. Meanwhile Miss Hooper (Emily Bowker) is seeing a man who swears he'll leave his wife for her, and Miss Bufton (Cara Theobold) doesn't mind being seen on a different man's arm every night. The personal crises that intrude on office life give a picture of women who may be more independent that the generation before them, but still have to rely on the hope of marriage as an escape from poverty.

Theatre review: I Am a Camera

Cabaret returns to London next month but first up we get the play that inspired it, John Van Druten's I Am a Camera, based on Christopher Isherwood's recollections of his time in Berlin. In the suitably dingy space of Southwark Playhouse's Vault, designer James Turner has created a room in Fraulein Schneider's boarding house on a two-sided raised thrust - it doesn't come with any mod cons, but it does come with a three-piece band playing mournfully behind the walls. It's the room that Isherwood (Harry Melling) occupies at the start of the play, but his ailing finances mean he's about to move to an even smaller and cheaper room across the hall. Replacing him in this room will be another English ex-pat, Sally Bowles (Rebecca Humphries,) an aspiring actress with a fondness for all the wrong men. Over the summer and autumn of 1932 we follow their friendship, and the way they and their bohemian circle of friends react to the rise of the Nazis.