Apocalypse!

Showing @ Tron Theatre, Glasgow until Sat 8 Oct – run ended. See below for full listings.

Everything somehow seems more serious when it features as part of a news broadcast; “statistics” and “facts” about how we live our lives force that pressure into exposing our own weaknesses. Newly formed company The Occasional Cabaret, a new partnership between Peter Clarke and Catherine Gillard, dissects that pressure, mixing it up in a nightclub style showcase as the end of the world approaches.

Set as a kind of grotesque Punch and Judy performance, the curtains open to Jet and Lulu (Catherine Gillard and Nancy Walsh), our narrators and cabaret performers who announce the world will end in one hour and fifteen minutes, give or take. Assuming the best thing to do is ensure everything goes out with a bang, the duo mix up some songs about the apocalypse while stopping to interview each other about their lives, as if judging themselves on the day of reckoning.

A rich and almost profound set of ideas underpin much of John Clancy’s script, as our hosts question the nature of virtue in society: ‘Did you recycle?’ ‘Have you donated to charity?’ At the risk of weighing down the jovial nature of the show, it’s jumbled around with some playful burlesque dancing and acoustic tracks provided by Tim Brinkhurst. So this performance is a balancing act; there should be enough substance in the text without preaching to the audience about how we examine morality in the modern-day sense. Sadly, this balance, which could have given the performance more edge and bite, is never quite found, only teasing at the ideas it examines while offering a fairly diluted cabaret show. For a performance which is welcoming the end of the world, it either needs to be more reflective of society’s ills, or what we perceive them to be, or a true ironic celebration of those inadequacies (balloons and all). So it’s an intriguing, rough and ready performance, which when tweaked and trimmed, will fall so slickly into the black comedy genre.

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