I Am a Camera

★★★★ Evening Standard

★★★★ ‘Southwark Playhouse has made increasingly creative use of their Vault space’ Exeunt

★★★★ ‘Harry Melling imbues Isherwood with a sinuous physical grace and a highly appealing charm… Oliver Rix’s debonair Clive is a bundle of hat-tossing sexually ambiguous delight… Humphries’ performance is a sensational piece of work’ The Public Reviews

‘Harry Melling is a perfect young Christopher’ The Times

‘Harry Melling brings Christopher Isherwood to amiable, and ultimately touching, three-dimensional life’ Metro

Based on Christopher Isherwood’s memoirs ‘Goodbye to Berlin’, and the inspiration for the musical ‘Cabaret’, I am a Camera is part glamorous whirlwind of Berlin Bohemia, part harrowing depiction of the Nazi’s rise to power.

I am a Camera’s title is a quote taken from Isherwood’s first page – “I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking”. The play’s Broadway premiere in 1951 was a triumph for Julie Harris as the insouciant Sally Bowles, winning her the first of her four Tony Awards for Best Leading Actress in a play. A subsequent 1955 film adaptation was also called ‘I Am a Camera’. With a screenplay by John Collier and music by Malcolm Arnold, it starred Julie Harris, Laurence Harvey and Shelley Winters. The play and film in turn went on to inspire the musical ‘Cabaret’ in 1966 by John Kander and Fred Ebb and the1972 film ‘Cabaret’ with Liza Minnelli, Joel Grey and Michael York.