Montselier by Cathy Wippell – Barons Court Theatre, London.
🍷🍷🍷🍷 (4 our of 5 fine wines… while wine is still available !)
As someone who has been attending the Edinburgh Fringe Festival since 1992, I’m no stranger to small-scale, one person shows. In fact I’ve written and directed a few myself.
But I’m consistently blown away at the level of talent some of these solo writer and performers exhibit – especially the younger ones – (or at least younger than me!) and this is no exception.
‘Cabaret For The End of the World’ is actually quite bleak – but it’s also very funny and often very moving too. Cathy Wippel plays Montselier, an Apocalypse surviver. (And, we soon find out, the only surviving accordion player in London!)
It’s the 453rd day after the Bomb has dropped, destroying London and maybe the rest of the UK and the world. This, unsurprisingly has TERRIBLY limited general entertainment, so Montselier has decided to have a cabaret performance in the Barons Court Theatre with us, the audience, assumed fellow apocalypse survivors.
It’s a clever conceit and works very well. We’re easily drawn into her world.
She first appears as a cross between a vamp and a vampire and starts with a striptease! Although it is only her hazmat suit, rubber gloves and goggles and we’re soon talking about acid rain and people growing extra limbs. But it’s a clever way of breaking the fourth wall and giving a slightly surreal conceit a contemporary relevance.
Wippel is wonderful with a perfect physicality. Her accordion is also a perfect partner. The script is coupled with subtle but perfectly-aimed commentary on our (actual?) current society, to the point of making everyone feel a little uncomfortable about the ‘real’ future. The hints as to why this whole mess happened, are perhaps chillingly relevant in current times. There are little asides like ‘maybe I should have signed a petition’ and ‘maybe I should have loved the world a little more’ which cleverly reflect on the increasing feeling of futility many people feel in the current political minefield, without being at all ‘preachy’, as Wippel brilliantly works us, the audience, too.
It’s a tidy and talented theatrical treat. So go see the cabaret for the end of the world. Before… well… before the end of the world? Without or without an accordion.
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