If you want lashings of glossy decadence, Cobden Club is the place. Above the members’ bar there’s a pristinely renovated Victorian music hall stage, with candlelit tables and high walls which are all mirror (apart from the embedded glitter-balls and gold goddess-heads). A great place for a cabaret then? Well, yes, but not, perhaps, this one. ‘Vinegar Tom’, written by Caryl Churchill for Monstrous Regiment splices a straightforward medieval witch-hunting drama with a crusading libretto, and it hails straight from the hemp-and-menses school of ’70s feminism.
Young theatre group Gilt and Grime has its work cut out with this unusually straight-faced stab at Brechtian feminist drama from the usually bewitching Churchill. Some of the lyrics have aged badly: one song about ageing women, with the refrain ‘nobody talks about it’ sounds a lot less edgy after ‘Menopause the Musical’. And the new score (by Harry Blake) doesn’t help much: it’s easy on the ear and nicely arranged for the well-pitched part-singers, but it’s about as far from raw polemic as the rest of their ironic frock-coated jazzy vibe. As the village yokels oppress the lovely local lasses (there’ll be at least one burnin’ before the play is out), the cabaret sounds more like a hollow distraction and less like commentary. Director Tom Platten keeps up the pace. But lively performances, meticulous musical direction, and a lot of talented people facing in different directions can’t quite make something meaningful out of this period curio.
