In The Creative Martyr’s bleak re-centering of cabaret, the duo are
There’s a brutal familiarity to Kabakunst. For a start, many of the songs are Martyr Classics. Kabakunst, created in collaboration with the Acquisecent Orchestra, Tom Harlow, Kim Khaos, John Celestus, Spangled Shadow, Bert Finkle and Markee de Saw, Calum MacAskill, Rufus and Ben, Tuesday McPhail, Drew Peacock, and Heather MacIntyre, trades heavily on its audience’s knowledge of previous Martyrs' shows. From the moment they introduce themselves, we’re anticipating cheerful tunes about death, drunkenness and destruction. More than that, though, familiarity is built into the very structure of Kabakunst. It moves, slowly, deliberately and relentlessly, towards its inevitable conclusion.As the title suggests, the entire action (or inaction) of the piece is confined to the world of cabaret. The events of the outside world, represented by a video feed of political speeches on a backdrop, all occur around this peripheral point. Most of the time, though, we watch the distracting routine of musical showstoppers. They get the crowd up for a stomping march. They demand the burning of dangerous books, and have the audience help them build a literary pyre. Tom Harlow embodies the sexual seductiveness of money. Memories of youthful idealism are revived, celebrated and abandoned.
This is choreographed resistance. Failed revolution distilled. Each routine, each jump forwards in time, is signalled with an interlude as the Martyrs grapple for meaning. Through it all, The Acquisecent Orchestra stare out with a chilling indifference, providing both musical depth to the songs and adding to the sense that the pair are trapped in a prison, in which observation is punishment. They seems to be obeying a regime enforced by the two silent henchmen who lurk around the margins of the stage. When the Martyrs chat or mime resistance or mockery of these sentinels, they are simultaneously trying to make themselves as invisible and inaudible as possible in this rigidly deterministic world.
The Martyrs might be the centre of the narrative, then, but they pointedly do not have the only voice within it. Unlike their earlier shows, they have other artists who dominate certain routines. And when Tom Harlow sings and dances, his glamour and choreography takes centre stage. “I'm money,” he smoothly croons before stripping and hiding behind whirling fans of feather. While The Martyrs may be robbed of their singular control of the narrative, the flavour and themes are clearly their own. Indeed, many of their routines are remixed versions of familiar tunes that speaks deafeningly of the controlling world in which they dwell.
But can Kabakunst really be thought of as a post-modern re-framing of Wiemar Cabaret? It certainly reveals what The Martyrs see as the horrific undercurrent of cabaret, including its most rebellious manifestation, exposing the careless apathy of a genre which is enshrined at the heart of the resistance to fascism and with which we are so often asked to sympathise. Yet still it restricts the performers to idealistic displays of helpless misery, giving them no more agency than characters in a scripted tragedy. The whole narrative of the show, meanwhile, is structured around the failure of the revolutionary ambitions to become activism. The presence of the two henchmen is the scaffolding holding the characters in place, their shadowy presence dominating from offstage with their comings and goings and gestured demands.
Cabaret itself is imagined by The Martyrs and co as a brooding,
Wildly thrashing his fake wings, Tom Harlow's character invites an immediate comparison with David Bowie, a man tragically obsessed with identity and determined to inhabit his own myth,
This is one of a series of characteristically stunning theatrical moments that break up the simple line of the narrative. Just as the movement from jollity to despair contained in the overall arc and individual numbers becomes predictable, I find myself dragged back by a brilliant routine or by a sudden, surprising display of skill, as in Khaos' dance on broken glass. As ever with The Martyr's work, there is an familiar use of crescendo that can be disengaging, but as soon as one of those moments interjects I’m brought back on board, that knot in my stomach tightening again.
As in Funny Trap, the climax of Kabakunst offers an echo of Soviet style state observation, but with a bloody twist. In the Martyrs' version, resistance is not beautiful or romantic or even straightforwardly tragic; it is tedious and enervating, usually foiled by alcohol or self-importance. No wonder it’s usually kept offstage.
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