Mrs Robinson: A Soap Cabaret

Four characters, all in funereal black, carry a boat onto the stage.  Is it a boat or a coffin?  At any rate, they are emigrees – and hedonists – fleeing persecution only to wash up somewhere like the Riviera.  It’s the 1920s.  The black costumes come off.  Underneath, svelte period swim wear that reveals as much as it conceals. 

We very soon get it that the real interest in this risqué little piece, despite the period setting and the backstory, is who is going to get off with whom.  There’s curvy Mama (Ruth Katerelos) who has her eye on spunky Harry (Tom Costigan) who is supposedly the boyfriend of daughter Amy (Casey Nicholls-Bull), who looks indeed as if she has stepped out of a 1920s silent movie, and free-floating dope-smoking Cousin Rodney (Chris Molyneux) who has his eye on Amy but seems to be up for whatever’s going. Towards the end of these convolutions, the cast is joined by Bruce Langdon as an all-white clad bowler and figure of authority.

‘Soap cabaret’?  Ella Filar’s show seems to me more a musical sex farce. Ms Filar herself is on stage, on keyboard, along with Martin Zakharov on sax, Sally Banks violin, and Roni Linser on jembe. The seven Kurt Weill-ish songs don’t so much move the plot forward as comment on it and on Life. There are fleeting references to Cabaret, the old television show Mr Ed, the nursery rhyme about the old woman who swallowed a spider, the poem about the man that wasn’t there and so on.

The production supplies the lyrics to these songs in the program. That’s helpful since the cast, for all their enthusiasm and ironic expressions, don’t sing all that well or all that clearly. Even so, reading the lyrics at one’s leisure, you see why they have problems: one is hard pressed to make sense of these songs. An example, chosen at random and, to be fair, out of context, from the opening song, ‘Happiness’:

A debt collector/With the dirty deal collector/Is passing me by/Bi-speculator/With vibrating calculator/Is passing me by/Happiness, happiness/Happiness, happiness/Happiness is not a crouching beast/Under your wedding dress…

Is this too ‘in period’?  Dada?  Surrealist?  Ella Filar has an undoubted flair for a particular genre of music and lyrics, but her best work – or so it seems to me – is when she is a collaborator and a contributor to someone else’s vision. Mrs Robinson (no, not that one) is her show and it leaves one curiously irritable due the wasted energy of the cast (who are working so hard) and the blocked talent of the music.

Michael Brindley

Photographer: Darren Gill