“The Doomsday Show”

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30534, 1 September 1964, Page 11

“The Doomsday Show”

[By PETER DAVID SMITH in the “Financial Times." Reprinted by arrangement.] From the blackedged programme you get at the door to the gong which sounds in the final scene to announce the end of the world, this peculiar little entertainment is designed to put you off your dinner. Perhaps that doesn’t sound like much of an evening out, but all. the same “The Doomsday Show,” presented by the Establishment Club, is definitely something to see.

“Cool, kinky and new, with an accent. on sex and violence,” is how it is described by Mr George Macßeth, the

compere and main author, and so it is; but it is disturbing and moving as well. We begin in the dark, fingering our programme like invitations to a funeral. Then the lights go up on a weird scene. In the centre of the stage sits the figure of a Gauleiter, his grim features lit sinisterly from below. He wears dark glasses and an arm-band of authority. (This is Mr Macßeth, in ordinary life a producer at the 8.8. C.) Around him stand three figures in black, two sexy girls and a he-man, all dressed in tight black sweaters, black ski-pants, and shiny black boots.

The lighting is dramatic to suit, and a metronome ticks away relentlessly somewhere. For scenery there is a collage of images of sex and violence —a photograph of Hitler ranting, the cover of a James Bond novel, some pink nudes from “Playboy,” and dominating over all the great familiar mushroom cloud. From a hook, a whip hangs. The lights go down, and from out of the dark a voice croons a lullaby:

“The day when Doomsday came The world fell fast asleep. Dreaming in its shroud of cloud, It slept eternally. . .” The last time we heard about Doomsday, it was Dr. Strangelove and his Doomsday Machine, the ultimate Bomb that will destroy all life on earth, and in fact Macßeth’s show is a sort of footnote to Stanley Kubrick’s passionate film. When “The Doomsday Show” begins, all life on earth I has been destroyed, but beneath the surface of the earth, in of all places the Paris Metro, a few survivors still live a twilight existence. How to stay sane is their problem, which they solve by playing strange ritual games, among themselves, parodies of their old life above ground, and these games become the various sketches of this strange revue.

First there are the memory games. The survivors in black re-enact their memories of the Four Minute Warning, the fatuous 8.8. C. announcer with his false comfort (“Some of us may die, but remember, statistically it is not likely to be you”), and the Broadcast that followed of a “speci-ally-shortened Mass.” To cheer themselves up, the figures in black recall almost with longing those “earlier, smaller cataclysms,” like Hitler’s massacre of the Jews.

They look back to their lives above ground with desperate nostalgia, dreaming of a glossy world that was never theirs “of Facel Vegas and very dry Martinis.” For

this sketch, Mr Macßeth has written some superb parodies of James Bond: “The great fans of the Russian helicopter beat the air. Through the snow-encrusted Perspex Immelman could see the tiny figure far below on the glacier.” As the games proceed, the desperation mounts. The stroke of the metronome shortens and quickens. A poem is read with echo effects that sound like a man having a nervous breakdown in the Grand Canyon. The people in black play the Scissor Man game, a savage charade of loveless sex. Finally they play a card game like a sort of Unhappy Families called Fin du Globe. This is the Doomsday Game, the last game of all before the gong sounds. Does this all sound very depressing? It isn’t. It’s a little frightening sometimes, but also often very funny, in the same mordant way as the Strangelove film. It is much more than a Ban the Bomb tract. The production (by Macßeth and Samuel Bingham) is swift and sure, but the acting is a bit rough, with the exception of Caroline Hunt, a beautiful girl with a voice that does the excellent writing proud.