Cast Announced for Gate Theatre's Effigies of Wickedness

Artistic Director Ellen McDougall today announces performers for the Gate Theatre’s groundbreaking collaboration with English National Opera opening in May next year. Concluding her inaugural season, Effigies of Wickedness is a cabaret show featuring a huge range of shockingly prophetic, satirical songs exactly 80 years after they were banned by the Nazis. McDougall directs Peter Brathwaite and Katie Brayand the production goes on sale on Thursday 21 September. Effigies of Wickedness opens on 14 May, with previews from 3 May and runs until 2 June.

In a groundbreaking collaboration between the Gate Theatre and ENO, we are thrilled to present a cabaret of riotous, witty, and shockingly prophetic songs, banned by the Nazis in the 1930s. As the Nazis identified difference as something to be afraid of, the Weimar cabaret scene danced on with songs that celebrated it. With artists from Brecht and Weill to Schoenberg, this subversive underground scene was bursting at the seams with brilliant, visionary voices. No surprise then, that they were censored, exiled, and incarcerated shortly after as ‘degenerates’. And their songs have been all but lost since. Until now.

Artistic Director of the Gate Theatre, Ellen McDougall said of the announcement “I am so thrilled to be collaborating with Daniel Kramer and ENO on Effigies of Wickedness (Songs banned by the Nazis). Daniel is himself an alumnus of the Gate, having directed groundbreaking productions of Hair and Woyzeck. We are developing a cabaret-style show with songs from the Weimar Republic’s subversive underground scene, with a live band. The songs are shockingly prophetic, covering topics including abortion rights for women, gender fluidity, and how our obsession with oil might cost us the world.

“I’m delighted to be working with Katie and Peter, both exceptional artists with a real passion for both the music and politics of this moment.

“Working with ENO provides another opportunity in this first season for us at the Gate to imagine what else theatre can be, to reinvent our space, and to make a piece of work that passionately champions diversity, difference and freedom of expression.”