REVIEW: Déjà Vu Kabaret at The Red Lion, Leytonstone 20 – 22 July 2023
‘There is fun to be had in agit-prop with acrobatics and songs and fish-net tights’ ★★★
There’s a green space in Istanbul called the Taksim Gezi Park, and in May 2013 it was scheduled to be concreted over to build a shopping mall. There were protests, occupations, brutal police responses. A sit-in became a protest camp, food was distributed to homeless people who joined the occupation, Prime Minister Erdoğan unleashed his signature repressive measures, and the occupiers embraced a variety of causes – eco-awareness, Kurdish liberation, protests against Erdoğan's rule of force. They utilised an exciting variety of forms of protest, without any central organisation, and theatre and humour were unusually prominent. Fans of the football club Beşiktaş looted/liberated an earth-moving machine and used it to challenge police water cannons. Erdoğan called them ‘a few looters’ (çapulcu), so they started referring to their activities as ‘chapulling’. Many thousands of people across Turkey mounted supporting protests, and the police killed a dozen protesters and injured thousands.
If ever an event sang out to be commemorated in a free-wheeling, multi-disciplinary theatre piece, it’s the month long occupation of Gezi Park. Alara Koroglu and her company Off The Beat Productions, give it a very creditable shot, with a motley group of friends putting on a free-wheeling cabaret show in the ballroom of the Red Lion in Leytonstone. She wrote it, she stars in it, she sings most of the songs, she channels her inner Sally Bowles and mixes in a smattering of Joel Grey’s Master of Ceremonies, and mounts the whole thing as a promenading, immersive, site-specific entertainment with a big agit-prop subtext.
The ballroom of the Red Lion is an impressive space, with very high ceilings, and lots of adjacent areas that the company curtains off to make it mysterious. We sit on either side of the room, watching performances on a raised stage and on the floor between the seats, and then we are divided into two separate groups and herded into other spaces, to hear stories and get aggressively interrogated by one of Erdoğan's police enforcers. This one is different, for he is a former lover of the cabaret star Seline. He thinks he’s maintaining order so people can go about their business undisturbed. Seline disagrees. Their arguments rehearse the pros and cons of the protests, heavily slanted towards Seline’s gender-neutral eco-warrior. The cast of the cabaret are inspired by the protests to participate, to fight, to put their bodies on the line and take their lumps. Seline’s new lover is shot by the policeman, but the struggle continues, and company and audience close the show with a rousing protest anthem.
The show is vividly open-hearted and committed to the cause of liberty, and its sincerity cannot be faulted. It is, however, a bit naïve. To call a show ‘site specific’ surely entails more than mounting it in a random, albeit characterful, space. The show could be done anywhere, but proximity to a threatened park, or to an Occupy Movement camp, might make it site-specific. This is a wide open playing space in Leytonstone, site-convenient maybe, but certainly not specific. And the promenading is a change of focus but it’s rather cursory – not moving and still getting confided in or yelled at in our seats would have the same effect. The politics, too, is somewhat by-the-numbers: love will win out, stand up for your rights, diversity is good, keep on fighting. No-one in the audience disagrees with any of that, and Suella Braverman probably wouldn’t want to buy a ticket. The ballroom has unforgiving acoustics, so some debate gets lost, but not too much that could be heard offered radically new ideas.
What we are left with is a colourful, committed, energetic entertainment that encourages ignorant Britons to find out about the Taksim Gezi Park protests, and that is well worth the price of a ticket. There is fun to be had in agit-prop with acrobatics and songs and fish-net tights. Off The Beat Productions approach a vital subject in a daring and innovative style; their stage-craft will develop, their passion is to be cherished.
Twitter @offthebeatprod
Reviewed by Chris Lilly
