STAGE CABARET

With

★★★★ Playhouse Theatre London until October 1 (kitkat.club)

Wearing corsets, their cheeks rouged, men and women writhe on bars and undulate behind beaded curtains. And that’s just the pre-show teaser.

Wilkommen to the Kit Kat Club where desire and desperation choke the air.

We’re transported to 1930s Berlin and it’s intoxicatingly immersive. The entire theatre is the set, reconfigured with a rotating central stage surrounded by rows of brass lamp-lit tables and new balconies. Kander and Ebb’s songs are as mercilessly provocative as ever, dark jewels glittering amid Tom Scutt’s stunning scenic and costume designs.

Eddie Redmayne, pictured left, emerges from the shadows in a ginger wig, back arched, neck and jaw jutting, a sinister Emcee with sadness and rage lurking behind dead eyes. The Oscar winner is mesmerising as the dancers caper around him in garish make up, the choreography fierce and muscular (no jazz hands here), sinister sprites in a fever dream, trying not to wake up to the rising Nazi tide outside.

None more so than Jessie Buckley’s club singer Sally Bowles, pictured right, defiantly in denial about absolutely everything inside and around her. When she screamed the climax of the boldly reworked title track, the crowd roared back, but, for me, it felt overthought and shouty, with no glimpse of the fear and yearning for the life and love she won’t allow herself to have.

Elsewhere, quietly, the tender doomed romance between Liza Sadovy’s landlady and Elliot Levey’s Jewish tenant is devastating.

By the end, everyone is in beige shapeless suits as individuality and diversity become death sentences. We, of course, are able to escape blinking back on to the street, haunted by the fate of those we have left behind.