Life is a cabaret for Leni, or possibly a dream. She is disoriented, confused. Perhaps the morphine she takes for pain relief is giving her this crazy dream that she is dead and wakes up every day to come here and talk to an audience.
So here she stands in vampish show mode to sing a few songs, recount some anecdotes, be a touchstone for history and attempt to restore her name. It’s harder to forget than remember and all people seem to recall is the gossip. The small minded have tarnished her name as a genius filmmaker, her work can’t even be shown in Germany.
The problem is that without Leni there would be no Hitler. Leni Riefenstahl was Hitler’s favourite filmmaker, his most skilled propagandist, creating evocative images of the Nazi Party’s Nuremberg Rallies. These revolutionary shots she recalls in every lens and f-stop without looking as the film plays behind her.
There are so many Lenis, a life of numerous contradictions. A heartbreaker who slept with everyone, but had she been a man she wouldn’t have been seen as a Nazi slut. To Hitler she was a perfect Aryan woman, their ascendant stars aligned. “Those were the days”, she huskily sings. He understood artists and the masses needed a hero, she gave them what they wanted with no half-measures, just like Wagner.
As for Hitler’s “shenanigans”, what did she know? Things would have been worse if it had not been for her damage limitation and besides, there was only so much she could do to resist.
Surrounded by film cuttings and schnickschnack she sets out to produce a director’s cut of her life. She zips through acetate and a constantly shifting wardrobe, draping herself with whatever suits her best. Filmmaking is smoke and mirrors and she is amused at what the audience will believe. She just needs one last camera trick.
This is a smartly scripted, hallucinatory, outrageous cabaret carried off with immense panache by Jodi Markel. Politics was traditionally treated on cabaret stages in a light-hearted way and while Leni would no doubt argue to being apolitical, here she is not beyond handling a punch line with a badum-tish comic sting and a high kick.
An intriguing history and a timely warning of the dangers of being lied to or of acquiescing to populist politics.
Show times: 1 to 25 (not 13, 20) August 2024 at 5.25pm.
Tickets: £13 (£12) to £14 (£13).
Suitability: 14+ (Contains audience participation and distressing or potentially triggering themes).