Death Of Cabaret

On the day the music died, it appears comedy slashed its wrists. SΘamus John Allen's direction of Damon Scranton's play offers up the cabaret underworld of a shackled pianist, a sunken-eyed MC and a diva fatale. Their catchy cod-Kurt Weill routine mounts cheerily morbid ballads of inhumanity, alienation and mortality, but it never approaches the ingenuity of Brecht. Through this mixture of demented tunes, stale jokes and tiresome ruminations on the purity of death, an audience plant is repeatedly encouraged to commit suicide. Although he politely declines, he remains the only spectator to feel involved. Meanwhile, clumsy video projections and hammy voice-overs provide "surreal TV" segments, featuring the gene for immortality and a surprise talk-show reunion between a bereaved mother and her resurrected child. This production can be recommended solely for those with a pitch-black sense of irony and no experience of the absurdist provocateur Chris Morris. Otherwise, it is a mercifully brief, ham-fisted satire that can make of death no laughing matter.

Runs until Saturday