"I Am a Camera". Keble O'Reilly
Before we start, a health and safety announcement. There is one major element of danger in this production - although it may not be deliberate. Before it starts, for reasons that are unclear, the house lights are switched off, so the audience members have to grope to their seats in darkness. On top of that, the crew have inexplicably removed the bottom step of the seating bank. I saw two people stumble off it in the gloom. To be fair, this is an easy fix, but it should be attended to urgently. Now, on with the show. According to urban myth, the New York theatre reviewer Walter Kerr gave the original Broadway production of I Am A Camera a three-word review: ‘Me no Leica’. 75 years later, is Christopher Isherwood’s snapshot of a bisexual Englishman abroad in Weimar Germany a sharply-focused piece of drama or a sepia-tinted remnant? Sony or phony? Isherwood’s reminiscences of the Berlin of 1930, teetering on the brink of Nazism, have a Russian doll history. He wrote them as separat...
