CABARET

‘Cabaret’ in French denotes a tavern, wine cellar or small restaurant, and the performances given in such places came to be called ‘cabaret’ too. The environment dictated some aspects of cabaret performance: relative brevity (since there was no call – and hardly the atmosphere – to mount a full-length show), a need to grab customers’ attention with something striking (since at least in cabaret's early days they had come primarily to do something else: eat, drink, talk), and a certain clubby informality: a playfulness and knowingness which acknowledged that the audience – often the local artistic community, the intelligentsia and folk from the Bohemian quarter – either were or liked to think themselves the ‘in’-crowd. In the English-speaking world (apart from the one-off ‘Cave of the Golden Calf’ run briefly by August Strindberg's widow Frida in London in 1912–13), cabaret didn't really get under way until after the 1914–18 war, and even then its melange of catchy songs, DANCE numbers and comic turns hardly rated as a major performance genre (though it did generate the Auden-Britten ‘Cabaret Songs’ for Hedli Anderson in the late 1930s). Things were different on the European mainland. There, between the 1880s and the 1930s and to an extent beyond, cabaret performance was a more serious – though rarely a solemn – matter. It flourished in many of the major continental cities, offering programmes of chansons (often risqué, satirical or subversive), monologues (often outrageous), dance routines, skits, parodies and dramatic sketches, and also longer playlets (often EXPERIMENTAL, sometimes shocking) which might involve live actors and/or shadow puppets or MARIONETTES. The ‘Black Cat’ in Paris, which in 1881 set the tone for European cabaret, the ‘Four Cats’ in Barcelona, the ‘Bat’ in Vienna, another ‘Bat’ in Moscow, the ‘Eleven Executioners’ in Munich, ‘Sound and Smoke’ in Berlin, the ‘Green Balloon’ in Cracow and the ‘Cabaret Voltaire’ in Zurich: these were some of the notable continental cabarets artistiques. And some of the artists who worked in them? At one time or another Christian Morgenstern and Max Reinhardt wrote for cabaret, Erik Satie played piano at it, Frank Wedekind sang to his mandolin at it, Arnold Schoenberg composed songs for it and did a stint as music director, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec created posters for it, the young Pablo Picasso designed flyers and menu-cards, and Gustav Klimt devised a costume for one of its characteristic conférenciers or masters of ceremony.