A Response to Ben Walters (1)

Over at Time Out - London's free arts and listings magazine, which educated me in the ways of performance and clubbing during my teenage years, Ben Walters has posted a transcript of his talk given at Edinburgh's Fringe Central on August 21, 2013. It's intriguing stuff: the deliberately provocative title (Is Cabaret Heading for a Class War), the obvious insider knowledge he displays and the generous attitude towards an art form that is often marginalised combine to make it a bold step forward, both for thinking about cabaret and the role of the critic.

Looking over Walters' reviews of the 2013 Edinburgh Fringe, it's pretty clear that he has adopted a position: he is a defender of cabaret, burlesque and neo-vaudeville (or whatever name the revival is calling itself in what must be its second decade). He has a detailed knowledge of the acts, and his star ratings are consistent. It's easy to understand why, in the context of his other reviews, he gave Dusty Limits five stars and Titty Bar Ha Ha one. Alongside his sensitivity to the audience response, this makes Walters one of the most useful critics in the UK - that he is working in cabaret ought to be a matter of pride to the genre.

Walters deals with several issues that are crucial within cabaret. First of all, he argues for its importance as an art form. This is not a given ('I've defended grass-roots cabaret against misconceived criticism that it is cheap and vulgar,' he notes). He surveys the influx of performers from a more 'conventional cultural establishment' (that is, artists coming in from outside the traditional cabaret community). He also addresses the common assumption that cabaret is dogged by vast amounts of 'bad burlesque.'

The strength of Walters' article is that he is both generous and honest in his assessment of cabaret's current state. While he acknowledges his subjectivity - 'You’ll notice a London bias to my observations, I'm afraid,' he confesses, he clarifies his terms of reference before drawing a broad optimistic conclusion. It's exciting stuff, showing how a critic can bring far more to the arts than a series of short reviews and providing star ratings to cover posters. 

He begins with a few anecdotal observations, coming from artists who are entering the cabaret scene from a different background. Walters names this background as 'above, if you’ll pardon the somewhat loaded term.' That is, artists 'enjoying a level of mainstream celebrity, or having connections to widely respected institutions and the financial support and professional credibility that can come with that... recent drama graduates, ballet performers, trained opera singers and so on.' They reveal an attitude that he sees as popular - and wrong. 

What started me thinking in these terms was actually a couple of comments ... from classically trained performers. One of them said she wanted “to make a difference of asserting cabaret as a good art form …not nipple tassels, bad burlesque.


There’s another début show by performers from ‘above’... which opens with a song that invites burlesque performers to 'see yourself for what you are – you’re just a pretty piece of meat parading round in your bra. Yes yes, you shake those tassels, yes yes, go on – yawn. Well done you, up on stage, giving desperos the horn.'

Former sketch comedian, now quiz show host 

And this in turn reminded me of the comments Alexander Armstrong, the TV comedian. 'I'm convinced that cabaret is set to return,' Armstrong told the Evening Standard. “People said it about burlesque and they weren't wrong. A whole load of old strippers bought themselves pompoms and souped up their sets and are calling themselves burlesque.' [Armstrong later apologised for the comments.]

If anything, Walters is too moderate in his response to these comments: these kinds of attack on burlesque are often couched in terms that are possibly sexist - the assumption that any display of female sexuality is necessarily pornographic - while Armstrong's recent comedy output gives him little foundation to be nasty about anyone relying on old glories. His suggestion that cabaret is about to return suggests he hasn't spent the last decade noticing anything outside of his limited TV world (a hypothesis that can be supported by a look at the diminishing returns of his sketch shows). 

Walters does admit that there are problems with some burlesque - he says they are the same problems faced by other art forms, like circus - and makes a lively defence of the medium. He points out that it created the audience that now enjoy cabaret. His final enjoinder ('they’re patronising attacks that are rooted in ignorance, intended to belittle, and suggestive of hypocrisy and insecurity) is spot on. What he doesn't do is consider why burlesque has this reputation, or whether the words of a hypocrite can contain a measure of truth...