Tales From a Cabaret

A year ago, The Creative Martyrs were schlepping around the Fringe, mostly as a dark comic song duo, bolstering variety bills with a dependably funny twelve minute slot of apolitical politics. Tales From a Cabaret – which is equal parts Brechtian cabaret, East European mime, British vaudeville and slapstick – is an ambitious leap, that takes them clear of the guest spot into uncharted areas of performance art.

The tales that thread their way through the hour reveal the gradual disintegration of the cabaret aesthetic in a climate of authoritarianism. Like Dusty Limits, The Martyrs hide a Jesuitical intelligence beneath a glimmering surface of humour: deconstructing the revolutionary rhetoric of the neo-burlesque revival, they pursue the puzzling path of polymorphous perversity's compliance with predominating political precepts.

Their take on decadence is almost exactly the opposite of Limits', however. For him, it liberates and resists: for the Martyrs, it is powerless and easily corrupted. When they note that "women have become more like women" in their cabaret, and that the freaks are being weeded out, it is a more trenchant critique of the current scene than any amount of second-wave feminist analysis.

The circular construction of the show is exquisite; the slow shift to despair from possibilities is perfectly timed; the play between the twosome comfortably contrasts eastern european innocence with sinister British wisdom. Funny, politically engaged, theatrically sophisticated and working to a determinedly personal vision, these Martyrs will be born again in uncorrupted flesh. [Gareth K Vile]