Mother Archer’s Cabaret For Dark Times.
Robyn Archer. George Butrumlis on accordion. Gareth Chin on piano.
Dunstan Playhouse. Adelaide Cabaret Festival. Adelaide Festival Centre. June
12-14 2021
Reviewed by Peter Wilkins.
Passion courses through Robyn
Archer’s songlist. With her latest show, Archer is in her element. Mother Archer’s Cabaret For Dark Times
gives a nod to the current pandemic with her rendition of Aristide Bruant’s
nineteenth century song about the cholera epidemic. With songs ranging back to
Oliver Gibbons’ The Silver Swan, written in the seventeenth century and forward to
Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weil, Marlene Dietrich, Brother Can You Spare A Dime from the Great American Songbook and
Noel Coward’s revue song, There are Bad Times Just Around The Corner,
Archer reaches into the dark corners of our psyche and the society that spawns
the struggles against poverty, misery,
exploitation and corrupt power. Opening
with The Alabama Song from The Rise and Fall of Mahagonny, Archer
demonstrates her brilliant grasp of phrasing and her empathy for soldiers
drowning their fears in whisky. Not only does she rightfully claim her status
as a wonderful exponent of the songs of Brecht and Weill, but also demonstrates
a diversity that has established her as a major voice for the politically oppressed
and the socially disadvantaged. At a time of fear and financial collapse, Mother Archer’s Cabaret For Dark Times
offers a panacea for survival and a defiance against the ravages of liquor,
death, disadvantage and the relentless advance of the ageing years. “I’m seventy-three next Friday” says the
Gemini star.
Archer’s wide ranging repertoire
is a homage to life. Interspersed with the poetry of Bertolt Brecht, her songs
storm against the injustices in What
Keeps Mankind Alive or mock the
evils of liquor espoused by none other than WC Fields. In soulful voice, Archer
reminds us that the pain of love lasts a whole life long in Plaisir D’amour. We are warned that “there
are dark clouds hurtling through the sky” in Noel Coward’s post war patter, There
Are Bad Times Just Around The Corner that makes fun of post war Britons’
propensity to moan.
With accordionist and long time
collaborator, George Butrumlis and pianist Gareth Chin, who stepped in two days
earlier to brilliantly replace Archer’s other close accompanist, Michael Morley,
Archer has put together a show that showcases her enormous talent as chanteuse
and political and social commentator. The tragedy of oppression and
manipulation is tempered with the comedy of human defence against the hard
times that reminds us, like Archer, not to take oneself too seriously, but to
always challenge and defy the forces of injustice. She can still belt out a tune
to right the wrongs, jest at Democracy’s
collapse at the Dismissal, feel for the battlers on the poverty lines and revel in the absurdity of the human
condition.
On the Dunstan Playhouse stage,
painted in indigenous designs, Archer stands and sings in a spirit of
reconciliation for all humanity. Her natural assurance, sincerity and humanity
asserts her place as a committed advocate for the underprivileged, a celebrated
chanteuse with passion and humour and a national treasure.
