There have been many revivals of John Kander and Fred Ebb’s Cabaret but no West End revival, since its London premiere in 1954, of John Van Druten’s I Am a Camera, the play on which they had based their 1966 musical. The English-born Van Druten (1901-1957), the author of Young Woodley, which was initially banned in England, emigrated to America and became an American citizen, and went on to have a highly successful Broadway career.
I Am a Camera, premiered in New York in 1951, was his last play. The highly respected Walter Kerr (the only theatre critic ever to have had a theatre named after him) famously dismissed it in one short sentence: “Me, no Leica.” But it went on to run for 214 performances and win the Drama Critics Circle Award. Julie Harris scored a big success in the leading role. So did Dorothy Tutin in London in 1954. Judi Dench played Sally Bowles in Cabaret in London.
The play was based on Christopher Isherwood’s semi-autobiographical novel, Goodbye to Berlin and set in 1932 when Isherwood had been in Berlin teaching English. He shared digs with a 19-year-old nightclub singer called Jean Ross and she was the inspiration for Sally Bowles. Ross was not pleased with his portrayal of her as a woman totally unconcerned with the rise of fascism in Nazi Germany and thought the Sally Bowles he had created was much more like a portrait of one of his flamboyant male friends.
The divinely decadent Sally Bowles, the star attraction of the Kit Kat Klub, with her green nail polish, green eye-shadow, false eyelashes, pale skin, red lips and helmet hair-cut, has become a familiar icon of decadence, Berlin style 1929/3, thanks to the definitive performance by Lizi Minnelli in the 1972 Bob Fosse film version of Cabaret. But Minnelli’s heroine is not Isherwood’s heroine. The whole point about Sally Bowles is that she sang badly without any expression and with her hands down by her side. She was mediocre and never going to be a star. Minnelli was a star and her cabaret acts were memorable. When she sang “Everybody is a Loser” she sang like her mother, Judy Garland.
The Sally of the novel wanted to be a femme fatale but according to Isherwood she was as “fatale as an after-dinner mint.” He falls in love with her but the relationship remains platonic. Isherwood, the passive, non-thinking camera of the title, was gay.
The play, well worth seeing in its own right, is a wonderful showcase for the right actress but Rebecca Humphries’s unappealing performance doesn’t have the range of emotion: Sally can be hard and soft according to the crisis, abandoned one minute, serious the next, and there should be moments of innocence and pathos. Harry Melling doesn’t have Isherwood’s charm and they make little of the scene when their best friend, a young German, confesses to being a Jew and they completely fail even to begin to understand what such an admission has meant to him.
Anthony Lan’s hectic, cluttered production is also exhausting to watch. Humphries and Melling are always on the move, jumping on the furniture and she shrieking away. The cast act in a variety of styles. The most successful actor is Oliver Rix, totally in period as a fabulously rich American playboy who promises the earth and fails to deliver.