The Gaiety keeps an old house full sign. The last time it turned up on this blog it was standing out on the steps, doing its proper job for a show I had walked into expecting to enjoy and did not. This time it was up on the stage as a prop, part of the junk the cats live in, while the house behind it filled up regardless.
Cats is not a show that troubles itself much with plot. A great many cats gather on one particular night of the year. One of them is chosen and goes on to somewhere better. That is about the size of it.
The production uses the whole building. Cats come down the centre aisle, appear in the boxes, arrive from behind you while you are busy looking the other way. You are not so much watching a stage as sitting in the middle of the thing, and the Gaiety turns out to be an excellent place in which to be surrounded by cats.
There are a lot of them. I gave up early on trying to work out which cat was which, and I suspect that is the correct response. There is a permanent low-level sense that something is going on just out of view, which is also true of actual cats.
The Manx touches are handled lightly. Flags. Place names swapped in where the script allowed. A local milk carton doing service as a prop. Small things, and the audience caught every one of them.
Three weeks ago I was lying on a mat in a field above Peel with nearly three thousand other people, on the ground where Joseph Pilates spent the First World War interned and worked out his method in part by watching the Island’s cats stretch. On Saturday I sat in the Gaiety and watched the traffic run the other way, a stage full of people taking a century of that study and turning themselves back into cats. I can report that they were considerably better at it than I was in my light blue tracksuit.
These are serious performers. Ballet, tap, and singing that would not have embarrassed an opera house. I was completely taken in, which is what I did not expect. What broke it, eventually, was a label on a costume catching the light and the sudden reminder that these were people in suits rather than animals who had learned to sing.
It is a Taylorian production and the cast is drawn from the Island. Gus is the old theatre cat, a star in his day, whose paws will not stop shaking. Afterwards my mother told me that the man playing him used to cut my grandmother’s hair. That is the Island in a single sentence, and one of the several reasons I keep going back to the Gaiety.
One of the best things I have seen on a stage. I left with no clear idea of what I had watched, and I loved every minute of it.
Charlton Krentz 