Theatre review: Apocalypse!

IN DOUGLAS Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, there’s a memorable scene in the Restaurant at the End of the Universe. Now – at the Tron this week, and then on tour to the Traverse and elsewhere – you can experience Scotland’s own tacky cabaret at the end of the world, courtesy of Occasional Cabaret, aka Benchtours of Edinburgh and Clancy Production of New York.

It would be wrong to expect perfection, or even polish, from this rough-edged attempt by writer John Clancy and director Pete Clerke to get to grips with the apocalyptic forces that seem to be shaking our civilisation. What’s exciting about this fierce and ragged show is the way in which it tries to shake up theatrical form, in response to a world in which there may now be little left to do but to make the best – creatively, beautifully, humorously or outrageously – of the short time left to us.

Billed as a “glamorously ugly cabaret”, Apocalypse! takes us through what might be our last 75 minutes on Earth, guided by Catherine Gillard and Nancy Walsh as Jet and Lulu – two raddled, gap-toothed representatives of middle-class western humanity – and made up of fierce monologues about human folly, desperate last-minute auditions for heavenly bliss, and raunchy songs, composed and played on moody live guitar by Tim Brinkhurst. The idea is sometimes stronger than the execution, as Jet and Lulu busk and fib through what they believe to be their last night on earth. The idea is so vivid, though – timely, disturbing, and so well worked out in the best of Clancy’s writing – that the show is impossible to resist, and it slices down to the hidden reality of the way we live now, in a way that makes the rest of our theatrical world seem pallid, and a little short of the courage it takes to face a terrible truth.