‘This is not an opening number’, Australian cabaret artist Meow Meow declares, as she staggers around in her fishnets on the wide Merlyn Theatre stage at the Malthouse Theatre, Melbourne, shoeless and half-dressed.
Meow Meow’s The Red Shoes, a co-production of Perth’s Black Swan State Theatre, Sydney’s Belvoir Street Theatre and Melbourne’s Malthouse Theatre, is her third cabaret work to draw on the fairytales of Danish poet and writer Hans Christian Anderson, following Meow Meow’s The Little Mermaid (2016) and Meow Meow’s Little Match Girl (2011).
The 1845 tale about a girl whose red shoes are cursed by a soldier so that when she dances, she is unable to stop – until she begs an executioner to cut off her feet with his axe – is suitably dark fodder for the cabaret chanteuse and multi-threat, and her esoteric existential musings.
Meow Meow: a wild ride
Meow Meow’s The Red Shoes is a wild ride, a sort of Weimar, Theatre of the Absurd-inspired experience, with a meandering plot that begins with Meow Meow off-stage, seemingly passed out, before she’s dragged on and rolled onto her back like a doll, for her not-opening-number.
She sits in a flop, marionetted and physically held up by one of the members of her Brechtian band, a cabaret chorus of three – Mark Jones, Dan Witten and musical director Jethro Woodward.
Sporting white-painted faces and wearing dusty coat-tails, these multi-instrumentalists are more than musical accompaniment – they’re clownishly comic stage-hands, vaudie back-up performers, their slick choreography elevating Meow Meow’s enervated ennui to a dance of despair.
She’s literally floored, catatonic at the state of the world, the devastating effect of Covid on her career, and grappling with writer’s block, before a surprise ‘embryo of an idea’ emerges, physicalised sensationally by operatic tenor Kanen Breen clad in fleshy membrane, his vigorous vibrato bursting (birthing?) out of an old fridge.
Meow Meow reluctantly rallies, allowing the story to take off on a tangent – ‘you can cope with a non-linear narrative, can’t you?’ she asks the audience – becoming a sort of cabaret quest to find her muse, her red shoes, and the meaning behind the fairytale.
It’s a beautiful mess – but there’s nothing accidental about this chaos.
Along the way, Meow Meow’s journey is punctuated through song, including Radiohead’s No Surprises and Amanda Palmer’s Smile, her richly theatrical voice accompanied by her trio in entertaining arrangements, variously employing piano, guitar, double bass and tuba, and often comically integrating physical gags into the performance (Meow Meow’s foot is co-opted into playing the piano accordion as she lies in a state of melancholy on the floor, for No Surprises).
You’re never quite sure where this cabaret caper going, but you don’t really care – and as some sort of psychic journey into Meow Meow’s mind, it’s crafty and clever comic chaos, with (worthy of the form’s origins) an inherently political bent.
Written across the velvet proscenium curtain that serves to shorten the black box theatre and push the stage forward, is EI BLOT TIL LYST – which Meow Meow tells us is a Danish phrase, meaning ‘not just for pleasure’. It’s to remind us, she says, that the purpose of art is not just to entertain, but to challenge the status quo, and make us think, offering a cathartic experience for the audience.
Underneath the performance prowess and all the comedic absurdity of the show, there is certainly meat on the bones, raising questions about economic and social inequality, misogyny and the financial impossibility of being an artist.
She grills Hans Christian Anderson (performed by Breen) about The Red Shoes and why he made a girl’s dancing a sin worthy of punishment rather than a delight to be celebrated.
She announces that communism has never lived up to its promise, and that she’s written an album about the disastrous menace of capitalism (available for purchase after the show).
She searches for a pair of red dancing shoes in her unopened Amazon boxes and mountain of trash occupying one side of the stage ‘which a respected dramaturg told me is a metaphor for the inside of my mind’ and in the audience, collecting handbags as she goes (as fair payment to make up for her impoverishment as an artist).
There is something so deliciously satisfying about seeing a performer like Meow Meow on stage, in full flight. Her talents are an embarrassment of riches, her craft a finely tuned weapon, and – aimed with the precision of an artist with a strong point of view – her art leaves its mark.
Meow Meow’s The Red Shoes is artful and absurd, a thought-provoking and wildly entertaining romp – a true cabaret masterclass from one of the absolute best in the biz.
