Swingtime
at Rogers The Cabaret Lisa Appignanesi (Studio Vista £6.95) Movie buffs have long been with us; blues and folk purists we have met ; and defenders of the true music-hall faith make one of the bastions of solemn Popular Culture. A cabaret snob is something new, but Lisa APPignanesi hasenough high-minded leftist rectitude to start a schism by herself. She is all the time worried we have been misled by that unfortunate Sally Bowles musical. Noel Coward is of course excluded ('socialite rather than satirist'). The author's taste runs to what she calls 'provocative sloganising and she quotes with evident approval the New Left scorn for entertainment : 'The very activity of laughter replaced any urgent need for activity on a more constructive level . . . The aim of these new cabaretists Was to illuminate the contemporary situation and raise consciousness about sc?ciallsol.' The book certainly raises my consciousness of what socialism can do to prose and argument. The story of cabaret through Paris, BerMunich and Vienna is an interesting Minor episode in cultural history. It touches On some important strands of avant garde expression. Unfortunately major figures are nearly always slightly outside the events (Debussy, Satie, Wedekind, Karl Kraus, C,,oeteau, Apollinaire.) Picasso and Francis "reo are often in the audience, never on centre stage. Of course, a few genuine talents db edge into the spotlight, notably Kastner, Brecht and George Grosz. But there is no serious analysis of their art, as distinct from their ideology. A crucial limitation lies in the handling of music: 'he Played anything from ragtime tp foxtrot to ?aeh brilliantly' sums up the method. Mrs _APPIgnanesi doesn't care whether performers could sing in tune or dance in time;
she believes that Friedrich Hollander wrote the music for The King and I, which will be news to Richard Rodgers; and she refers dismissively to 'Fargeon' revues.
But really you'd expect contempt for Atniisierkabarett from someone who has such a weakness for Lenny Bruce, who thinks TW3 was revolutionary and whose critical analysis takes this form: 'When the satire boom was at its peak between 1961 and 1963, English society was already well into that permissive heyday which turned certain long-held values topsy-turvy and gained London the reputation in the media of being the swinging world capital of the sixties.' We hear of 'Zurich, the Noah's Ark of World War l' and of 'a kindly, hirsute, guitar-touting inhabitant of the Butte.' The author invents a word miniscule, a phrase child battery and (for all I know) a translator called Koka Koala.
Much the best feature of the book is provided by the illustrations: some evocative programmes, a Bac poster of Yvette Guilbert, Dietrich in The Blue Angel with inches more thigh than in the usual still (so my students tell me), and a cherubic William Rushton in one of those endless football supporter sketches. The painful thing is.to drag your eyes. back to the text, which cites Kastner on one satirist trying 'to stop a catastrophe with a typewriter.' I'm afraid Mrs Appignanesi started a few concentration crises with hers. Come back, Sally Bowles, all is forgiven.
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