Self-styled “Physics Chanteuse” Lynda Williams’s Atomic Cabaret at Belfast’s Accidental Theatre is old-fashioned agitprop in the seductive guise of a nightclub floor show.
Marking the 80th anniversary of the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it’s a timely commentary on the life-ending threat of atomic weapons, the chilling grimness of its content—the current nuclear arsenal is enough to destroy all life on the planet 15 times over—glossed by Williams’s cheeky “Carl Sagan meets Sandra Bernhard” persona.
The Hawaii-based physicist and tutor has a neat sideline in presenting cabaret shows for her fellow scientists at conferences and events. Now she is pitching to a more general, possibly less well-informed, audience.
And there’s the rub with Atomic Cabaret, at least in this première showing where first-night nerves, technical issues and slender audience numbers put a damper on proceedings. Clothed like Liza Minnelli’s halter-necked, bowler-hatted Sally Bowles, Williams has a confident warmth and eagerness about her that extends to pre-show meeting-and-greeting of the audience. And, true to her agitprop predecessors, an invitation to the nearest pub post-show.
In this first outing, it feels more illustrated lecture than cabaret, let alone Williams’s claim for it as “science theatre”, the reliance on illustrative slides begging a more immersive, theatrical treatment in want of a director and designers. As she notes, “the problem with science theatre is you have to do a lot of exposition”.
Its wide-ranging discussion of the potentially hubristic exploitation of nuclear science boils down, in one of the evening’s several pithily pointed asides, to the notion that “atoms are very much like humans: when they get too big for their britches, they become unstable”.
If Williams has yet to dilute and hone her source material to make it fully digestible in the 80-minute playing time, she makes amends with original songs that playfully incorporate a purring hint of Eartha Kitt, grunge, metal and pop music idioms, while also borrowing from The Sound of Music’s "Do-Re-Mi".
The emphasis is on sometimes sly, more often slicing, commentary, caustic satire and bursts of righteous outrage about the pact with the Devil that nuclear weapons present. Arguing for a saner approach to nuclear weaponry as the world trembles at how a demagogue American President might respond to precipitous events in the Middle East, it has the echo and edge of unheeded warnings from Weimar Germany’s cabaret scene.
Atomic Cabaret can be seen on tour at York’s Friargate Theatre (June 28), the Headingley Club, Leeds (June 30), Seven Artspace, Leeds (July 3), Hen & Chickens, London (July 10–12), and Durham Fringe Festival (July 23–24) before a run at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival (August 1–9).