The conversion of the Playhouse Theatre into The Kit Kat Club is a master stroke when theatre audiences are looking for something different to draw them back into the West End.  The playing area is in the round with tables with lights surrounding the stage for a night club atmosphere and ordinary seats, some with bar tabling further back in the stalls.  It is strange to think that this was the space where The Jungle played three years ago.  Safety is paramount in this morally dangerous venue with Lateral flow tests necessary for entry. 

Before the show, ticket holders are invited into the bar areas, one downstairs in the theatre labyrinthine corridors where the prologue show is under way with provocative dancing in 1930s silk and lace underwear. 

The bar staff are all very smart with bow ties and white jackets.  Upstairs around the bar and into the performance area, the prologue dancers tease the public followed by a clarinettist and saxophonist

The 1930s decadent Weimar Republic’s Berlin is the setting for Kander and Ebb’s musical Cabaret with Eddie Redmayne as The EmCee and directed by Rebecca Frecknall.  Based on the writings of Christopher Isherwood, Cabaret is derived from his novel memoir Goodbye to Berlin and in the musical, the author is Clifford Bradshaw (Omari Douglas). 

The first sight of Eddie Redmayne as The EmCee is in his bizarre and unglamourous costume, a 1930s Liberty vest, so called because they were designed at the start of the 20th century to free women from the restriction of corsets, a divided brown skirt, black gloves and a small green dunce’s cap on top of his bright red hair.