Meow Meow review – kamikaze cabaret combines clownish comedy and crooning

‘I bash deliberation successful 90 mins,” says the kamikaze cabaret performer Meow Meow, “we tin truly marque a difference.” It’s a joke, clearly: successful the look of encroaching tyranny and freedoms everyplace circumscribed, this blithering and eccentric diva seems improbable to beryllium overmuch use. It’s each she tin bash to get her amusement started, wheeling a soft effortfully onstage, replaying the whoops and cheers of bygone gigs and glories connected a feeble Walkman. And yet, by the extremity of It’s Come to This, Meow Meow – AKA Melissa Madden Gray – seems truly to privation to ask: what, successful specified ominous times, should the creator do?

You tin spot wherefore the question mightiness interest her, engaged arsenic she is with the songs of the Weimar epoch (Brecht and Weill’s Ballad of the Soldier’s Wife gets an outing here). Elsewhere, our big-haired, boundaries-free big twins chanson with clownish drama successful unsocial combination, present crooning Jacques Brel, present crawling cleavage-first implicit the shoulders of her crowd. As assemblage members are press-ganged connected signifier to fondle and manhandle its star, the amusement (with soft by Ben Dawson) tin look similar an experimentation to spot however battily you tin behave earlier the opus you’re singing is eclipsed entirely.

The reply is: rather a lot, if your dependable is arsenic ravishing an instrumentality arsenic Meow Meow. Occasionally, the shtick subsides and we get to truly savour it. Equally often, that dependable seeks attraction for itself astatine the disbursal of the song. Latterly, the amusement devolves into worrisome governmental inquiry, arsenic our big frets astir the emergence of nazism and Walter Benjamin’s thoughts connected the angel of history. Knowing what we cognize of the 1930s, what should we bash present akin tempest clouds are gathering? Her words “I don’t know” resounding similar a siren, Meow Meow raises the alarm, but offers fewer answers.

• At Soho Theatre, London, until 24 May.