Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club - Wilkommen einmal

Privileged to have been there on press night three years four months ago - rave review here - and equally so to be invited back, albeit following an initial request, to see the great Billy Porter (centre above in the first of Marc Brenner's production photos) as the new Emcee. 

This is still the most perfect show that I know on the London stage - it was the best thing I saw in 2021, operas and plays included. The backstage/outside auditorium entertainment has been augmented - if I remember right about the first time - to include a small space where one of the dancers worked miracles around a violinist and pianist. If the first half seems even more extreme now - OTT is part of it - that only makes the darkening shadows of the second all the more sinister. The audience laughed bitterly when Cliff asks Sally to follow him to 'safe' America. And director Rebecca Frecknell's minimising the swastikas and enveloping the cast in anonymous suits insists on how totalitarianism can take hold anywhere, any time (Porter 'conducting' the final scene below).

A condition of my visit was that I wasn't going to write a review as such. My emphasis is on the continuity of this extraordinary show, how it continues to sell out, be revitalised by all the cast changes since Eddie Redmayne and Jessie Buckley wowed us. What I will say is that Sally full of inner rage is also what we get from Marisha Wallace, giving another consummate artistic spin on 'Maybe this time' and storming in 'Life is a Cabaret'. As with Buckley, I'm left wondering how such an intense performance can happen night after night (though Wallace isn't singing in all performances).

Both Fraulein Schneiders and Herr Schultzes have been very fine, but I'll repeat - none will surpass the pair we had in our Edinburgh University Theatre Company production, which I've written about twice before. 

Kerry Richardson, the Schneider, who made me weep every night in 'What Would You Do?', went with me the other week to the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond to see Peter Forbes, the Schultz, as Stalin, no less, in Howard Brenton's outstanding new play Churchill in Moscow. Here they both are after the show. 

We all knew Peter would be the one to succeed, and now he's come into his own as, among many other things, the best Buddy Plummer I've seen, in the National Theatre production of Follies. The Stalin role, probably the first time the character has had an inner monologue (springing from a Pushkin poem), is just as important as that of Churchill - the nominal star (because he's a name) Roger Allam. Production photos here by Tristram Kenton.

The unpredictable turns in their relationship, with both actors playing off each other to perfection, is mirrored by their interpreters, fictional creations but delicious ones: RAF Lieutenant Sally Powell (Jo Herbert) and Red Army Lieutenant Olga Dovzhenko (Elisabeth Snegir). It turns out, of course, that MI5 meets NKVD here. The two pairs waver between a move towards what they have in common and a deeper knowledge that more separates them than can ever connect them

In the games of the couples, we also see Molotov pitted against UK Ambassador Archie Clark Kerr. The solitary individual is Svetlana, Stalin's teenage daughter. I can see why she ends the play looking towards her breaking-free of the allotted role, but there was a sense of 'oh, is that it?' Otherwise, a wonderful piece of theatrical twists and turns. No-one was sure when we went whether there would be a West End transfer, but we hope and pray there is. 

As for awards, how would you privilege Allam over Forbes any more than you could choose between Ben Whishaw and Lucien Msamati in Waiting for Godot? Peter, of course, the most genuinely modest and thoughtful of people, doesn't seem that bothered. In the last two weeks he was also going in to rehearsal as Leonato in the RSC's forthcoming Much Ado About Nothing. He's already a stage legend to those of us who've been following his career since that Edinburgh Cabaret.

A beautiful goodbye to my mother

Today would have been my mum's 94th birthday. She so nearly made it, had a mostly splendid final year at the best of care homes, Greenacres in Banstead (run by the not-for-profit Anchor company), visiting which was always a joy, and seemed to be recovering from a chest infection when she died suddenly on 30 December. I've stated it already: no regrets, because she never declined in to a miserable last few months, and was adored by her carers who still tell me they miss her so much.

I was delighted that one of them, the lovely Myrna Ward, spoke so beautifully at the funeral alongside the physiotherapist I got in to see her every week, Bhawna Brijwani. The idea was to get people from various periods of mum's life to follow my eulogy (which I managed to get through without succumbing to tears, or at least only briefly towards the end. I'm used to speaking without a script, but the words just flowed when I wrote). So my childhood friend Gail, whom I haven't see for years, spoke about the friendship between her mum Marie and mine, which ran from aged two to the ends of their lives - birthdays and departures were astonishingly close. In the photos below (you can always click to enlarge), on the inside front cover of the order of service: mum as a baby with her parents, as a little girl prancing on the b, as a glamorous teenager not long before her beloved mum's untimely death; with my dad; with the children who loved them as their second set of parents before I came along, cousins Diana and Michael with her and mother Edith, Sara and elder sister Sue with mum and dad. 

Liz Grover from what started out as the Young Wives' Drama Group gave a vivacious tribute, and goddaughter Sara, who gave mum so much pleasure by visiting Greenacres regularly with daughter Hanna and baby grandson Lenny, read the bit from the Bible I'd requested, the famous Corinthians passage about faith, hope and love. Inside back cover: son in the picture, born eight years after they got married, with parents at Eastbourne and in the back garden, dressed in the costume mum made for me as Sir Joseph Porter in our junior school production of HMS Pinafore, with dad holding adored Zsabo; with stepfather Ron, his dog Jinty and mum at graduation; mum and Ron at another wedding; mum with friends - Marie in Sorrento, Margaret in Cambridge and Joy, who died in 2024. That's on a boat somewhere (the only one of the two of them I could find that was any good).

Of the hymns, I had no choice but to give in to mum and her friends with 'Make me a channel of your peace' - at least the words, by St Francis, are good - but got my way with 'Lord of all hopefulness' and 'Guide me, o thou great redeemer'. And of course I organised the music, knowing that mum would have loved it, though I'm still not sure what her own personal choices would have been (I'd asked, but never got very far). I am sure that she would have loved the major participation of violinist Benjamin Baker, whom she always remembered as a brilliant young violinist of the Yehudi Menuhin School, where she and Joy ushered. Even in her last year, when I mentioned him, she cited the YMS immediately. This is Ben in rehearsal with Tom Pope, one of my oldest friends, from university days.

Tom also accompanied Ben and my other half, Jeremy, in an aria from Bach's St John Passion, and Ben in the most perfect performance of the 'Meditation' from Massenet's Thais you'll ever hear. That came after George Harcourt-Vernon led the prayers. Vicar Kate had just left on holiday, but it was a blessing that lay minister George was available, as unlike Kate he'd known both my mother and myself, when I sang in the choir during the 1970s. 

He did a wonderful job and the big worry, that the service would run over and make him late in accompanying the coffin to North East Surrey Crematorium to give a valediction, didn't materialise; he, Jeremy and Liz got there in good time, while I hosted the rather jolly tea laid on by the Mothers' Union in the Open Door cafe just down from the church. Biggest joy here was to see adorable 'Auntie' Betty Reavley, who hadn't changed at all in her sweetness even at 97, and her daughter Jill, family of my youth, and Margaret Carter's eldest daughter Marese, another playmate along with her sister Katie in early days (I now realise that though an only child, I was never without surrogate brothers and sisters). Here are Marese and Betty.

 I felt so supported, too, by four friends from Dublin who didn't know mum but came out of solidarity, and a cluster of my great university pals, pictured below (from left to right Tom, Simon - who played Debussy's Syrinx so beautifully in the service - Jo, Catherine and Mary, whose dad the Rev (later Canon) Thomas New had been such a presence (he died last year, and Mary was back in her old stamping-ground for the first time in years).

I don't mind at all if people want to watch the whole service,  filmed with excellent sound by All Saints and placed on their YouTube site. The formal part starts at 11m30s, Ben playing as the coffin is brought in with more Bach (the Andante from the Sonata for violin in A minor). If you just want to witness the musical side, the Bach aria is at 38m20s, Syrinx at 46m45s and the Massenet 'Meditation' at 1hr6m7s. The playout is also worth catching - Julie Andrews singing mum's party-piece, 'Burlington Bertie from Bow'.

The splendid floral bouquet for the coffin - I wanted purple, yellow and white - should have been collected from the church by Greenacres, wasn't and actually seemed just fine on the lawn by the porch; it lasted three weeks.

The final gesture is to get mum's ashes placed as near as possible to dad's beneath the west tower of the church, and to have a small headstone made. There will be one more little ceremony for that. Meanwhile, warmest thanks to everyone who came, participated or just watched live or later. Finally, here's a repeat of mum still looking elegant on her 93rd birthday, the photo I used for the back cover of the order of service.

Happy 94th, mum - we won't forget you.