Recapturing the daring of a lost era
Barry Humphries’ Weimar Cabaret Barbican Centre ★★★★☆
The explosion of new ideas that happened in Germany between the end of the First World War and the rise of Nazism has had an incalculable influence on music, art, film and architecture – even, via the Bauhaus school, on the Barbican Centre, itself.
The style of Berlin’s sexually liberated cabaret scene, meanwhile, has influenced everything from goth to glam to disco.
This evening of music and songs from the time, wittily compèred by the creator of Dame Edna Everage, “playing one of my most complex and subtle characters” – himself – captured some of its daring and experimentalism.
Humphries offered up the story of how a chance find of sheet music in a Melbourne bookshop in the late Forties had fuelled his lifelong passion for the composers of the era.
Here, the Aurora Orchestra and singer Meow Meow brought their music to life. Taboos were broken in Erwin Schulhoff ’s 1919 composition “for men only”, Sonata Erotica –a poem constructed from sex talk during a rather long, expressive orgasm. Meow Meow’s comic timing as she punctuated the moans and yelps with pauses to turn the pages was delightful.
There was a reminder that Dadaism can still sound strikingly futuristic in Ernst Toch’s Geographical Fugue, from 1928. It was constructed from the orchestra individually speaking place names, which were rapidly intertwined and repeated – “Yokohama, Titicaca, Rimini, Trinidad”. Humphries called it the first example of rap music.
And there were brilliant songs. Mischa Spoliansky’s Alles Schwindel was a glorious ode to cynicism (“fall in love but after kissing, check your purse to see what’s missing”); Brecht and Weill’s earlier lament for a mercenary lover, Surabaya Johnny, had Meow Meow enduring the romantic suffering that ensues for the unworldly wise (“you didn’t want love, Johnny, you wanted cash, Johnny”); and Humphries accompanied her for Paul Abraham’s mildly saucy Mausi, after which he planted a kiss on her cleavage.
When Aurora’s first violinist and musical director Satu Vänskä joined Meow Meow for the Sapphic duet Wenn die beste Freundin, once sung by Marlene Dietrich, the mind drifted to what it must have been like to be in Berlin, before all this creativity was snuffed out.
If there was just a touch of the museum experience, there was something to be cherished in this lovingly curated glimpse of a lost time.