Where Cumming was brazenly sexual, there’s something abstract and parodic about Redmayne’s nonetheless consummately physical characterisation, as if conjured from a nightmare. He keeps pivoting during that rabble-rousing first number, enacting a carousel of calibrated poses, like a figure from a musical-box.
Then, his shrouded dancers suddenly revealed, he becomes the gleeful conductor of an orgiastic frenzy, scuttling impishly beneath artfully arranged legs and buttocks. The dancers – Julia Cheng’s choreography as meticulous as Frecknall’s direction – shift, in their sync’d twists and tilts, freezes, shakes and shimmies, between mesmeric insolence and menacing inhumanity. This reaches its zenith later with Money, Redmayne a skeletal mephisto in a cap reminiscent of an SS helmet, encircled by affectedly loping acolytes.
The intensified nature of Frecknall’s approach cleverly marries the work’s disparate worlds and, by degrees, the good times turn bad, the big-top sounds acquire a more militarised hue, and tenderness marches off. Liza Sadovy’s pragmatic landlady recoils from her Jewish suitor (kindly Elliot Levey). Bowles drifts from the increasingly disenchanted American writer Cliff – a charismatic and hypnotically alert Omari Douglas.
Her journey towards the horns of a hellish dilemma – stay or go, but if the latter, where on earth to? – is delineated to perfection. The chameleonic Buckley makes her first big entrance in her flapper-age opening song Don’t Tell Mama, springing through a central stage aperture like a petticoated doll let dementedly loose.
In the second half, in a jaw-dropping re-imagining of the title number, the lyrics are delivered not with familiar Broadway-ish reassurance but numb defeat rising to thrashing, yowling anguish.
In an unforgettable exit, the actress plunges, grey-suited, down through the stage, her face a Munch scream, her arms flung madly aloft. That image alone is worth the hefty price of admission. Never mind “Willkommen, bienvenue, welcome”. I’d say, dig like your life depended on it into your pockets, and Gehen, allez, go.
Booking until October. Tickets and details: 0333 009 6690; kitkat.club
