Clive Davis - The Times Four Stars
She brings the past to life. Fiona-Jane Weston has rounded up a formidable cast of VIPs for her self-styled “khaki cabaret”: Ivor Novello and Marlene Dietrich rub shoulders with Jane Austen and John Betjeman. But the story she tells — energetically researched and performed with charm and wit — relies just as much on the voices of ordinary individuals.
The songs and reminiscences of Wartime Women are skilfully knitted together. Mrs Thatcher and the Falklands may be absent — the programme comes to a conclusion in the age of Vera Lynn — but there are echoes of her steely voice in an opening sequence in which Elizabeth I addresses her troops at Tilbury. From that slightly gauche starting point — shades of a school pageant — Weston and pianist/musical director Jennifer Lucy Cook embark on a quirky journey in which officially authorised visions of combat and the British home front give way to glimpses of the mundane and appalling reality.
Weston somehow maintains a light touch, imparting intriguing nuggets of information at every step. We hear how children of the Great War gave Sing a Song of Sixpence a cynical twist and discover the different ways in which the ubiquitous Lili Marlenewas used as an anti-Nazi propaganda weapon. A poem by Vera Brittain seeks out gallows humour in the misery of a hospital ward, while an anonymous sliver of verse tells of a housewife’s sardonic delight in finishing a blackout curtain. Jacques Brel’s Marieke isn’t an obvious period choice, but with its dissonances and its mix of French, Flemish and English it makes an audacious addition to the First World War playlist.
While Weston suffered the occasional memory lapse as she negotiated the labyrinth of prose and lyrics, she and her director Tim Heath pull off the daunting challenge of turning tragedy into humour, the unspeakable into art.
She brings the past to life. Fiona-Jane Weston has rounded up a formidable cast of VIPs for her self-styled “khaki cabaret”: Ivor Novello and Marlene Dietrich rub shoulders with Jane Austen and John Betjeman. But the story she tells — energetically researched and performed with charm and wit — relies just as much on the voices of ordinary individuals.
The songs and reminiscences of Wartime Women are skilfully knitted together. Mrs Thatcher and the Falklands may be absent — the programme comes to a conclusion in the age of Vera Lynn — but there are echoes of her steely voice in an opening sequence in which Elizabeth I addresses her troops at Tilbury. From that slightly gauche starting point — shades of a school pageant — Weston and pianist/musical director Jennifer Lucy Cook embark on a quirky journey in which officially authorised visions of combat and the British home front give way to glimpses of the mundane and appalling reality.
Weston somehow maintains a light touch, imparting intriguing nuggets of information at every step. We hear how children of the Great War gave Sing a Song of Sixpence a cynical twist and discover the different ways in which the ubiquitous Lili Marlenewas used as an anti-Nazi propaganda weapon. A poem by Vera Brittain seeks out gallows humour in the misery of a hospital ward, while an anonymous sliver of verse tells of a housewife’s sardonic delight in finishing a blackout curtain. Jacques Brel’s Marieke isn’t an obvious period choice, but with its dissonances and its mix of French, Flemish and English it makes an audacious addition to the First World War playlist.
While Weston suffered the occasional memory lapse as she negotiated the labyrinth of prose and lyrics, she and her director Tim Heath pull off the daunting challenge of turning tragedy into humour, the unspeakable into art.
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Jeremy Chapman - Musical Theatre Review
Now for something completely different – a cabaret about the role women played in war, from Queen Elizabeth I’s speech to the troops at Tilbury in 1588 to Hannah Snell, who disguised herself as a man and joined the Marines in 1747 (and even got a man’s war pension!), right through the trauma of the two World Wars that shaped all our lives.
Fiona-Jane Weston’s well-researched and nostalgic Khaki Cabaretshow provided an absorbing couple of hours for a capacity St James Studio which premiered it before an autumn tour which will include a visit to the Belgian First World War battleground, Ypres.
The stories of the bombings on Birkenhead, on Liverpool post office and the raids on Wallasey, where I was born, particularly resonated because I was there, albeit unaware of them, in the spring of 1941. They shaped my life and that of my mother who played her part in the Women’s Voluntary Service but was forever bitter that the Second World War took away her youth.
It also, naturally enough, resulted in her near-lifelong hatred of the Germans, and I can still remember the look of horror when, in 1968, I told her I was marrying the “enemy”. She came round in the end but it took 30 years.
Weston herself was born into an academic family in Hartlepool, which was the first place in Britain to be bombed in the First World War, and this versatile singer-actress-writer (she even threw in a bit of nifty dancing) immersed herself into this project for a year. It made for a hugely educational and rewarding evening.
Songs, rousing and sad, were interspersed with poems and prose readings, helped by authentic uniforms, from khaki trenchcoat, almost as heavy as Weston herself, to the blue of the Women’s Auxiliary Flying Squadron, and we learned, to nobody’s great surprise, that female pilots were paid 20 per cent less than the men until parity was grudgingly achieved in 1943.
The familiar – ‘Keep the Home Fires Burning’, ‘White Cliffs of Dover’, ‘We’re Going to Hang Out the Washing On the Siegfried Line’ and the tongue-twisting ’Sister Susie’s Sewing Shirts For Soldiers’ (with the audience being encouraged to join in and find out for themselves how hard it was to do at speed!) – mixed seamlessly with the unfamiliar, and I was particularly taken with ‘The Girls With Yellow Hands’, about munition workers, penned by modern singer-songwriter David Stevenson.
Weston made a good fist of Jacques Brel’s dramatic ‘Marieke’ (was this really a war song or just a song about lost love?) and, of the many items that brought a lump to the throat, Siegfried Sassoon’s poem ‘Hero’ (“Jack fell as he’d have wished, the mother said/And folded up the letter she’d read/The Colonel writes so nicely. Something broke/In the tired voice that quavered to a choke”) was especially moving.
On the other side of the coin, John Betjeman’s ‘Invasion Exercise On the Poultry Farm’ found the humour that kept us going forward in those grim times as did Arthur Schwartz and Frank Loesser’s ‘They’re Either Too Young Or Too Old’, which Bette Davis sort-of-sang in the 1943 movie Thank Your Lucky Stars, bemoaning the fact that suitable men in her age group were all away fighting and thus her choice of beau was severely limited.
The 1942 Duke Ellington song ‘A Slip of the Lip Can Sink a Ship’, emphasising the importance of keeping your own counsel in wartime, was big in its time but not often heard these days, while there was the inevitable ‘Lili Marlene’, Dietrich’s famous contribution to a war in which she batted for us after becoming a US citizen in 1939.
It was all Lombard Street to a china orange that the encore would be Vera Lynn’s anthem ‘We’ll Meet Again’, one of the few items which didn’t surprise on a totally fascinating and worthwhile occasion, a chance to learn as well as be entertained.
Jennifer Lucy Cook did the honours womanfully on piano, but men were allowed a small part in this homage to feminist endeavour with Tim Heath co-devising the show and Weston’s husband Patrick Lambe permitted to conduct the raffle. This was for The Jelly Baby General’s Coveted Confectionery Emergency Ration Box No. 1, generously donated by Hannam’s, the Islington sweet factory whose jelly babies (originally called Peace Babies) were invented to mark the end of the First World War.
Those who didn’t draw the winning ticket had the consolation of a bag of jelly babies to sustain them through a evening that was quite nourishing enough.
Jeremy Chapman
Now for something completely different – a cabaret about the role women played in war, from Queen Elizabeth I’s speech to the troops at Tilbury in 1588 to Hannah Snell, who disguised herself as a man and joined the Marines in 1747 (and even got a man’s war pension!), right through the trauma of the two World Wars that shaped all our lives.
Fiona-Jane Weston’s well-researched and nostalgic Khaki Cabaretshow provided an absorbing couple of hours for a capacity St James Studio which premiered it before an autumn tour which will include a visit to the Belgian First World War battleground, Ypres.
The stories of the bombings on Birkenhead, on Liverpool post office and the raids on Wallasey, where I was born, particularly resonated because I was there, albeit unaware of them, in the spring of 1941. They shaped my life and that of my mother who played her part in the Women’s Voluntary Service but was forever bitter that the Second World War took away her youth.
It also, naturally enough, resulted in her near-lifelong hatred of the Germans, and I can still remember the look of horror when, in 1968, I told her I was marrying the “enemy”. She came round in the end but it took 30 years.
Weston herself was born into an academic family in Hartlepool, which was the first place in Britain to be bombed in the First World War, and this versatile singer-actress-writer (she even threw in a bit of nifty dancing) immersed herself into this project for a year. It made for a hugely educational and rewarding evening.
Songs, rousing and sad, were interspersed with poems and prose readings, helped by authentic uniforms, from khaki trenchcoat, almost as heavy as Weston herself, to the blue of the Women’s Auxiliary Flying Squadron, and we learned, to nobody’s great surprise, that female pilots were paid 20 per cent less than the men until parity was grudgingly achieved in 1943.
The familiar – ‘Keep the Home Fires Burning’, ‘White Cliffs of Dover’, ‘We’re Going to Hang Out the Washing On the Siegfried Line’ and the tongue-twisting ’Sister Susie’s Sewing Shirts For Soldiers’ (with the audience being encouraged to join in and find out for themselves how hard it was to do at speed!) – mixed seamlessly with the unfamiliar, and I was particularly taken with ‘The Girls With Yellow Hands’, about munition workers, penned by modern singer-songwriter David Stevenson.
Weston made a good fist of Jacques Brel’s dramatic ‘Marieke’ (was this really a war song or just a song about lost love?) and, of the many items that brought a lump to the throat, Siegfried Sassoon’s poem ‘Hero’ (“Jack fell as he’d have wished, the mother said/And folded up the letter she’d read/The Colonel writes so nicely. Something broke/In the tired voice that quavered to a choke”) was especially moving.
On the other side of the coin, John Betjeman’s ‘Invasion Exercise On the Poultry Farm’ found the humour that kept us going forward in those grim times as did Arthur Schwartz and Frank Loesser’s ‘They’re Either Too Young Or Too Old’, which Bette Davis sort-of-sang in the 1943 movie Thank Your Lucky Stars, bemoaning the fact that suitable men in her age group were all away fighting and thus her choice of beau was severely limited.
The 1942 Duke Ellington song ‘A Slip of the Lip Can Sink a Ship’, emphasising the importance of keeping your own counsel in wartime, was big in its time but not often heard these days, while there was the inevitable ‘Lili Marlene’, Dietrich’s famous contribution to a war in which she batted for us after becoming a US citizen in 1939.
It was all Lombard Street to a china orange that the encore would be Vera Lynn’s anthem ‘We’ll Meet Again’, one of the few items which didn’t surprise on a totally fascinating and worthwhile occasion, a chance to learn as well as be entertained.
Jennifer Lucy Cook did the honours womanfully on piano, but men were allowed a small part in this homage to feminist endeavour with Tim Heath co-devising the show and Weston’s husband Patrick Lambe permitted to conduct the raffle. This was for The Jelly Baby General’s Coveted Confectionery Emergency Ration Box No. 1, generously donated by Hannam’s, the Islington sweet factory whose jelly babies (originally called Peace Babies) were invented to mark the end of the First World War.
Those who didn’t draw the winning ticket had the consolation of a bag of jelly babies to sustain them through a evening that was quite nourishing enough.
Jeremy Chapman