When considering
cabaret acts, the names of composer Benjamin Britten and poet WH
Auden don't immediately spring to mind. Yet the most revered British
composer of the twentieth century and the equally iconic Auden
briefly dabbled with the form after early collaborations on the
films, Coal Face and Night Train, and the radically inclined song
cycle, Our Hunting Fathers. Tell me The Truth About Love is a new
show in which playwright Mark Ravenhill and composer Conor Mitchell
bring together the four songs the pair wrote alongside new treatments
for another four sets of lyrics by Auden, for which Britten's music
is presumed to be lost or incomplete. As a flame-carrying bonus,
Mitchell has also composed brand new settings to a quartet lyrics
penned by Ravenhill. These will be performed by Jamie McDermott of
flamboyant ten-piece chamber-pop ensemble, The Irrepressibles.
“I'm a complete
Britten geek,” Mitchell says of his interest in the composer, whose
centenary was recently celebrated at the Aldeburgh Festival, which
was founded by Britten. “I knew there was this set of existing
cabaret songs, but they've always been hard to perform, because
there's only four, then there were these other four which I did the
music four, and then Mark came up with these new lyrics, which made
for a complete hour.”
As Ravenhill explains,
“Auden and Britten were inspired by cabaret songs from America and
Germany, and I think they initially set out to write these things for
fun, and as a sideline to what they saw as more serious work. Auden
wrote a play with Christopher Isherwood, The Ascent of D6, which
Britten was also writing the music for. They all thought that this
was a more serious thing, but which is pretty much unstageable.”
While Ravenhill's early
career was defined by his 1996 play, Shopping and Fucking, the last
few years has seen him look to other theatrical forms to make hybrid
works, often with music. The last music theatre collaboration between
Mitchell and Ravenhill was Ten Plagues, an intense song cycle
performed by Marc Almond at the Traverse Theatre during the 2011
Edinburgh Festival Fringe. This followed Shadow Time, commissioned
for the twenty-first anniversary of the London Gay Men's Chorus.
While the sensibilities of all these have trickled down into Tell Me
the Truth About Love, particularly in terms of the homosexuality of
both Auden and Britten, both Ravenhill and Mitchell are keen to
stress the differences as well.
“There's less of a
narrative than in Ten Plagues,” Ravenhill points out, while
Mitchell observes that “Cabaret songs have to be immediate, to get
the lyrics through. With something like Ten Plagues, you can play
with things, and one word can have twelve notes to it, bit you can't
do that with cabaret songs.”
For Mitchell, who has
recently worked at Perth Theatre with long-term collaborator and the
theatre's artistic director, Rachel O'Riordan, following in Britten's
shoes might have been more daunting if he hasn't observed this maxim
of keeping things simple.
“I composed it
twice,” he says. “I always start something and think, I'm going
to show them, but the first time was too complex, so I went back and
listened to what Britten did. I learnt a lot, because he just went
for cabaret tunes.”
While Auden and Britten
remained classy even as they were attempting to be trashy, The Truth
About love is just the latest example of a reinvention of cabaret
over the last few years which hasn't been since the 1980s so-called
alternative scene. This was recognised in 2012 when cabaret was given
its own section in the Edinburgh Festival Fringe programme, while
both Camille O'Sullivan and the Tiger Lillies have performed in the
Edinburgh International Festival.
While such formal
recognition is significant, the irresistible rise of cabaret gas also
been sired by the recession.
“Cabaret is cheaper
to do than a full play,” Ravenhill observes, “and a lot of it has
come out of what's happening in pubs and clubs as a way of
entertaining people with something that's not quite comedy and isn't
quite theatre. For a while I think people associated cabaret with
what happens on cruise ships, but it does seem to be back in a more
interesting way now.”
Mitchell goes further,
pointing out how “the institutions of music are starting to lose
their rigid definitions. These days you van have pop singers singing
classical works, and classically trained singers singing pop songs ,
so these old barriers are starting to melt.”
Mitchell and Ravenhill
plan to collaborate further on projects great and small. With Marc
Almond still performing Ten Plagues, the pair are also looking to
working with him again.
“Ultimately I'd like
to try and find the resources to stage a big opera,” Ravenhill
says, “but we just have to find something that excites us all, and
that we can get our teeth into.”
Tell Me The Truth About
Love, Underbelly, Edinburgh, July 31st-August 26th,
7pm-8pm
The Herald, July 23rd, 2013
ends
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