I saw Fury and Elysium at The Other Palace tonight and let me just fast forward to the second act before I even begin to delve into anything else. The play is set in Berlin, Germany and is centered around these queer Jewish artists and revolutionaries of their time. The second act begins with all the house lights still up and one of our main characters “The Writer” walks onstage. She stares menacingly at all of us. Everyone continues to talk, and she is still looking. Turning her head back and forth to make sure she is surveying everyone in that audience. After a while I realized what was going on; because why is everyone still talking when we have an actor on the stage? I begin to laugh to myself and then myself and “The Writer ” make long eye contact. I smile and she smirks. Everyone around us is still talking and the house lights are still on. This continued for what I imagined was five minutes, but it felt like fifteen. No one would be quiet, barely anyone looked at her, and it took an awfully long time to only hear a couple whisper to one another in the audience. I believe this was done to show how a woman’s presence is not as effective to silence a room as a man’s ability would be and is or a switch of a light cue to tell us to turn everything off. It was baffling. And comedic and so good, oh my goodness, it was so good. The play got us. The audience got- got!! This was probably the coolest part of the show to me, and I am so glad this is how the director chose to continue the play after intermission.
To circle back though, this play follows the lives of these queer women in Berlin in between the two World Wars. There is The Writer, The Dada, The Madam, The Dancer, The Socialist, and The Drag King. All characters have a solo song that explains their story and why they must fight for their liberation, and each depicts a certain struggle that most women deal with in their lifetime. Abortion, supporting family but expecting to be married, sexual freedom, discontentment with society and politics, and even the dealing with an anti- semitic community. The show, although the story telling was a bit confusing at times, truly was a vignette play that had dance numbers that seamlessly transitioned one story to the next. The first song we get to hear is a story of hope from “The Writer” and how Berlin is her home. She describes how she is going to conquer this new city she has traveled to and make it her oyster. The penultimate song of the show is from the same character crying out to Berlin to let this still be her home, but alas the song ends with her taking a train ride somewhere she does not know.
This show felt very similar to what I imagine Cabaret is. They entertain you with the sex and glamour in the first act and by the second act it is when you begin to hear the bellowing songs that are less hopeful than before. “The Dancer’s” song was my most favorite. She kept singing a very sensuous chorus that revolved around her and what she could provide to those that have fetishes and who wish to rent her for the night. She then has a beautiful dance number in the middle of her song and by the end of the choreography she walks through the audience to the bar, has a glass of water, and then sighs heavily and saunters herself back to the stage. She then begins the same chorus again with the final 2 verses changed to be much sadder and degrading to what she felt invigorated in before. She loves dancing and the dancing her clients want her to do is not satisfying for her soul anymore. Her 3rd and final lover left her, and she now performs the dance number again but does so in a more morbid and frantic tone.
From what I understood about this play (and it ending with the cabaret style club being bombed by the Germans), it was about what liberating freedom can do for someone. How living moment to moment is all we can do. Society will always beat you down and hate you, so why even bother giving them a glimpse into your life? Certain characters would continually say they are not political and then go on and make a very politically charged statement. “The Dada” explains that nothing is supposed to make sense, and everything does not matter. A very genuine artist’s cry, ha-ha. But what I gained from this musical was even though these women were living through the harshest of times; they said fuck it. And were themselves. And they died happy; regardless of how society treated them. Regardless of how their friends treated them, or even how their fellow cabaret girls treated them, all were content in themselves and seeing that type of strength come from six femme presenting people onstage was really something special for me.
Theatre in London U of A 