Bremner Duthie brings his musical theatre solo show, Singing into The Dark to Edinburgh Fringe this summer.
“Singing into The Dark begins on the stage of a ravaged theatre. An actor tumbles into a theatre ripped apart by violence to find his colleagues beaten and arrested by the authorities.
Only their shattered props and costumes remain. He knows that to escape the only sane choice is to be silent and vanish into the night.
But an audience has slipped through the broken doors. Risking his life, he decides to use all his talents to defiantly recreate the acts of the missing company.
And because celebration and humour are also acts of resistance. Singing into The Dark demonstrates how to fight oppression with fury and laughter, rage, and delight.”
Where: Sanctuary at Paradise in Augustines
When: 2-9 Aug
Ticket link: https://www.edfringe.com/tickets/whats-on/singing-into-the-dark
Your show takes a look at theatre in a political context. What was the inspiration for this?
I wrote Singing into The Dark about 10 years ago, when politics in the USA were becoming increasingly dark and taking on a tinge of pre-fascist days in Germany.
I’m first a singer, and I had heard the amazing 1936 song by Mordecai Gebertig: ‘Unsrer Shtetl Brent’ (Our Town is Burning).
Gebertig wrote it about a Jewish massacre in a Polish village, and the song is about the importance of speaking out against oppression {“take a stand, join a line, fill a bucket, douse the fire, douse it with your own blood, or let the village burn, just don’t stand there looking on, with futile folded arms”).
Before his murder by the Nazis, Gebertig said he wanted this song to be an inspiration not only to Jewish groups but to all movements against repression.
Since my particular ‘group’ is the theatre, I wanted to use it in the context of repression against performers.
When Hitler took power in 1933, he first struck out at performers and artists and closed theatres until they could be staffed by Nazi sympathizers. Performers were arrested and taken to the first concentration camps.
All of this came together when I read the story of the Eldorado Cabaret in Berlin, a home to alternative lifestyles and wild performances. After the Nazis raided the Eldorado, they made it into the local Nazi headquarters.
This material weaves into Singing to The Dark, which speaks to the events in Berlin in 1933, but is also about repression and censorship in our times.
I wrote it with those inspirations, but I then took out all references to a specific time or place or country, so it’s up to the audience to decide when and where the events are taking place.
Nowadays, with Trump cutting all arts funding and setting himself up as head of the Kennedy Centre for the Arts in Washington, DC, there are some worrying parallels to that earlier time.
Your show is a one-person cabaret with the Nazi oppression and current politics in mind. Was it always planned as a musical?
I come out of Opera. I was trained as a classical singer and sang opera for several years before I moved into musical theatre and cabaret, so all of my shows have singing and music at their centre.
When I heard the song ‘Unser Shtetle Brent’ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Es_brent I wanted to find a way to work with it and this show grew out of that idea.
I’m also fascinated by the Cabaret scene of Berlin in the 1920s, which resembles some of the open, welcoming alternative spaces that exist right now.
And, I was concerned about the swing to populist, right wing movements that are happening around the world right now, and how, as in the USA, and Hungary this weekend, they are beginning to censor alternative voices.
I chose songs that were either from the 1920s and 30s or would fit into that time.
In the show, the performer makes an attempt to recreate the whole show, so he sings songs that would have been sung by the different members of the company, which gives me a chance to sing a set of amazing, varied tunes.
How did you get your start in theatre? Do you find Fringe festivals inspiring?
I was trained at McGill School of Opera in Montreal and sang classical opera in New York.
Later, I was accepted into the Banff 20th Century Performance program, which encourages the participants to create their own work and experiment with forms and styles.
That pretty much has defined everything I’ve made since then — at the end of my brief opera career I had decided to quit performance, since I found that I really, really did not enjoy the opera life.
However, inspired by Banff, I had written a small show based around the music of the 1920/30s German composer Kurt Weill, and as a lark, I took it to a couple of Fringe Festivals in Canada.
It was a huge hit, and it kept me in performance. So you could say that Fringe Festivals have inspired most of my life.
What are you looking forward to the most at Edinburgh?
I love doing this show, and my performance space at Paradise at St Augustines looks amazing, so I’m really looking forward to doing the show!
Then, there’s the concentration of other amazing shows that I get to see and are so inspiring, so I know I’ll leave pumped and inspired to make amazing things.
Outside of that, well, my Dad was Scottish, and for a few years he took the family back to his hometown in Inverallochy, Aberdeenshire.
I spent a fair bit of time wandering around Edinburgh when I was a kid, so I’m always thrilled to go back to the city.
Where can we see your work after Fringe?
After the Edfringe, I go directly to another festival in Canada, where I’ll be performing a new show of Berlin Cabaret songs from the 1920s.
Wild, fun songs that discuss gender fluidity, workers’ rights, the lies that are constantly fed to us by news organizations, the problems with capitalism etc etc. And in the show, I try and point out that some of those songs could have been written last week.
If you do want to see some of that work, it’s all on YouTube, and I have six albums, with three dedicated to that period, and they’re on all the streaming sites!