Love for Sale

Devised and performed by Kelly Burke, this one-person show blurs theatre with revue. It’s a smoky, spiky rendition of standards from early 20^th-century composers and lyricists, including German composer (and frequent Brecht collaborator) Kurt Weill.

Burke, a drink in hand, takes the time between songs to bitterly stitch them together into a tale of a woman fleeing heartbreak, from the backstreets of 1930s Paris to a Pacific island, with warplanes flying overhead. She’s a club singer turned hostess, smiling daggers at grasping men.

There are dark shadows cast by Burke’s effective, sharp-edged, whisky-witted performance of a woman scorning the dreams of her past. She draws the spotlight while shrinking from it, sketching an engrossing, Cabaret-esque portrait of immaculately dressed despair in harsh lines.

Burke’s selection of music is intelligently textured. While firing caustic asides at an inscrutable Joseph Atkins, who accompanies her on piano, she moves from a wittily flippant tone (in Weill and Brecht’s ‘Nanna’s Lied’) to a cold, broken cynicism when she reaches Cole Porter’s ‘Love for Sale’.

She charts her character’s arc in complex notes, twisting songs into new meanings in skitterish refrains. Each time it reappears, ‘the next whisky bar’ lyric of Weill and Brecht’s ‘Alabama Song’ feels increasingly like a cry for help.

Ultimately, this show thrives on Burke’s performance. However, the misery we glimpse around the edges of the songs never quite breaks through. We are left with a sense of incompletion, an archness that falls just short of pushing the show’s musical set into somewhere new.