Theatre
Review
Review: Sabrage
The cabaret at Lafayette is a sumptuous night of entertainment and excess
Towards the end of Sabrage, dancer and aerialist Kimberley Bargenquast mounts a pole and is suspended out over the audience, flying in a circle around a central pivot with a bottle of champagne. Leaning down over the stalls, she tops up the uplifted glasses of audience members – most of whom probably do not need much more to drink – with gleeful energy. Over the last couple of hours, we the audience have witnessed a man percuss along to ‘Je Ne Regrette Rien’ by slapping his (ahem) appendage against a microphone, been doused with feathers in a theatre-wide pillow fight and watched a woman juggle Chinese parasols with her feet. This is the image that sticks in the mind when we exit Lafayette, though – beautiful, scantily-clad people flying around the theatre, dousing us in champagne.
Sabrage promises a night of lush entertainment, both in its emphasis on excess and its emphasis on drinking. A cut-together montage of lyrics about drunkenness sees the cast appearing in unexpected places around the small theatre to lip-sync along, whilst the staff at the theatre slip in-between tables to serve round after round of beverages. There’s a decent amount of clowning and picking on the audience, as any good cabaret promises, and a little liquid courage isn’t a bad thing if this cast decides to single you out – the laps of those sitting close to the stage are fair game as seating, and those invited onstage are liable to be asked to hold bottles of lotion next to a naked compere, or participate in a mimed masturbation battle. Comedy double act Remi Martin and Spencer Novich guide us through the proceedings, with plenty of charm, blue humour and nudity, both deliberate and accidental.
The clearest homage to Parisian cabaret comes in the form of the strip-tease that opens Act Two, in which the apparently unprepared dancers stay barely covered behind their towels. There’s plenty of impressive circus talent on display as well – Emma Phillips’ feet-juggling act is a standout, as is Flynn Miller and Kimberley Bargenquast’s ariel routine, which closes out the show. Musical talent comes in the form of Cherise Adams-Burnett’s rich vocals, breaking up the lip-synced numbers with a series of live performances, during which she manages to have convincing chemistry with every audience member she singles out. As a repackaging of the cabaret tradition for a London audience, Sabrage more than succeeds. It’s a very, very hard place to have a bad time.
Sabrage is now booking at Lafayette until early July – find tickets here
