“I did a play once in London, Red, which we did at the Donmar Warehouse, then it transferred to New York. But that was about a month later. Having something lay for a couple of years before returning to it… It’s a weird mixture of hoping that the character has been sat there, ruminating, but there’s extraordinary excitement to start afresh and re-approach when some of the groundwork has been established.”

Eddie Redmayne is talking Cabaret, and specifically its new context. After his wildly successful run in London during a bizarre time (2021–22, the slipstream of the Covid era), the show is set to open the Kit Kat Club on Broadway this April, at the August Wilson Theatre. Unnerving and physical, with the actor really harnessing his body, Redmayne’s West End portrayal of the Emcee wowed audiences and critics, landing him an Olivier for Best Actor in a Musical. The description ‘shape-shifting’ applies in every sense to this character. But Redmayne has long showed himself an actor of calibre: he got his first Olivier, Best Actor in a Supporting Role, for that John Logan play about Mark Rothko, getting on for fifteen years ago.

You might have already seen the Emcee’s cone hat, gloves, liberty vest, rouge cheeks and wave of auburn hair. But you’ll only feel the performance when you’re there. Redmayne has taken great pleasure in creating a radical strategy, stripping away the trappings of how we live now to honour the sempiternal nature of the theatre experience.

“One of the great things today is the sacred idea of what you don't see,” pinpoints the English actor. “That was really important to me in our image-saturated world of Instagram and social media.”

“I’d been to a club in LA that, when you arrive, you get given a little sticker to put over your phone camera so you can't take a picture. When the club opened, there was uproar about this. But a week later people were walking around with the stickers on their phone like a souvenir, it became a kind of status symbol.”

“I wanted to bring that to our production: if the production is good enough, you’ll hear about it. What happens in the Kit Kat Club stays in the Kit Kat Club.”

Having rebranded The Playhouse Theatre in red neon, there were no half measures. Even the Box Office declared ‘Willkommen’. Directed by Rebecca Frecknall, with immersive design by Tom Scutt, choreography by Julia Cheng, and Isabella Byrd’s atmospheric lighting, the production is very different from what people think they know of Cabaret: the bentwood Thonet chair and bowler hat have been disposed of. This is a decadent, gender-fluid imagining of when Weimar Berlin, liberal with an avant-garde underground, came to a halt amid the rise of the Nazi Party. Of a specific time, performed at this time, it is within those parameters we find it breathes and endures. Featuring music by John Kander, lyrics by Fred Ebb and a book by Joe Masteroff, the show is based on John Van Druten's 1951 stage play I Am a Camera, which in turn draws from Christopher Isherwood's Berlin stories.

It’s a world without figurative distance between cast and audience, sitting around cocktail tables and believing that you are in a nightclub. There’s palpable anticipation. As well as champagne and schnapps.

“What made the experience so unique, and I hope we bring to New York, was the sense of occasion,” Redmayne continues. “You would have people dressed in black tie, next to people in fetish gear, next to people in jeans and a t-shirt. It was this amazing mixture of community— and I got to respond to all these different people in completely different spaces. It's why I’m so eager to bring it to Broadway. Having that intimacy with an audience, an ever-changing audience, is a performer’s dream.”

“With Rebecca's guidance, I approached the character in a completely different way, which for me was like throwing clay at a wall. Making big gestures, which were moulded as you found the through lines. The character revealed itself as the piece came together – which felt quite terrifying, I'm not going to lie. The other character in all the Emcee’s scenes is the audience, I could start to unpick this whole other level to him.”

“It lives in this extraordinary placeless place that defies definition, and I think it's one of the reasons that Cabaret, and certainly the Emcee are seen as these enticing pieces and characters: because it allows for reinterpretation.”

Joining Redmayne on Broadway will be Gayle Rankin as Kit Kat chanteuse Sally Bowles, Bebe Neuwirth as Fraulein Schneider, Ato Blankson-Wood as Clifford Bradshaw, Steven Skybell as Herr Schultz, and Henry Gottfried at Ernst Ludwig.

When Redmayne talks of re-excavating the Emcee, he means it, having taken part in a school production aged 15. Following aged 18 at the Edinburgh Festival, at a new venue, the Underbelly, under George IV Bridge.

“I was renting somewhere with friends, and you would get up and go flier around midday on the Royal Mile, encouraging people to come and see it,” he remembers. “By eight o’clock you’d be dressed head-to-toe in latex and PVC. This was two shows a night. Because it sold well and I didn't really see daylight for months, I became quite skeletal and very, very pale, but I remember it being the most thrilling moment of really pushing myself. It was a moment that made me think, ‘I would love to try to be an actor, I feel like I have the passion for it and the tenacity for it.’”

Underbelly, or Ed Bartlam and Charlie Wood, became very successful as a producing house and and got in touch with Redmayne eight years ago about doing it again. He called Jessie Buckley (for Sally Bowles) admiring her anarchic quality and classical theatre career. As fans of her direction of Tennessee Williams’ Summer and Smoke, the pair approached Rebecca Frecknall. At the time they didn’t have the rights, but alongside alchemy, destiny prevailed.

“The greatest pride I felt in my career is after I had left the show, I would walk around London and I would see Sally Frith, who played Frenchie, or Daniel Perry who was one of the Kit Kat boys, on the side of a bus, and it would be saying “This is the greatest show in town.” Though I was no longer part, I helped put it out into the world. One of the things that Rebecca and Tom and Julia, our incredible choreographer have done is fill the Kit Kat Club with individuals. It’s a celebration of the individual.”

The new Broadway production will run in parallel to the London version, which continues to play to sold-out houses nightly. 

When speaking about theatre, Redmayne carries a reverence that is tangible and profound (“It’s the reason I got into doing what I do.”). Early in his career, he performed at The Old Vic, the Royal Court, the Almeida, the Everyman, the Globe, as well as the Donmar. As a very certain kind of Oscar and Tony-winning Hollywood actor, he is driven by and remains close to the craft. You could say in the manner of a young Ian McKellen: they have both played Richard II.

The week before we speak, Redmayne finished an eight month shoot in Hungary for the Day of the Jackal. I wonder how he’ll look after himself for the next six-months as the Emcee in New York.

“Good question,” he considers. “When I saw Alan Cumming do it, there was Club Cumming which was the dressing room, and there would be these brilliant after parties – to which I look with mild envy. Unfortunately the way my voice works, the way my body works, is to be more monastic. Like being an athlete. There's a gentleman in New York called Gregg who my friend Andrew Garfield has highly recommended, who kept him upright during the very physical making of Angels in America. So I’m starting to see him.”

There’s also the comfort of a grounding, clandestine pleasure: borrowing someone else’s phone to watch cookery clips on Instagram.

“I don’t have my own account, and I’m worried that I’m wasting my life doing it,” he laughs. “But the thrill I can get from seeing someone do something with orzo is sort of overwhelming. Then there’s the trickery: the seduction of sound effects and quick cuts, how satisfying it is to pull a knife out and slice through a piece of dough. Occasionally my wife finds me and asks what I’m doing: looking at Instagram recipes I will never cook but that I'm finding thrillingly satisfying to watch.”

EDDIE REDMAYNE
TEXT DEAN MAYO DAVIES
PHOTOGRAPHY OLIVIA ARTHUR
FASHION HARRY LAMBERT
REPLICA MAN #13, SS24
COVER STORY