Peter Groom, Dietrich: Natural Duty ☆☆☆☆☆ Wilton’s Music Hall, London
What is the enduring appeal of Marlene Dietrich? What makes her still so bewitching? Especially to queers? Peter Groom’s one (wo)man show Dietrich: Natural Duty, currently on at Wilton’s Music Hall in East London, certainly goes some way to answering that. The ethereal beauty, the playfully enigmatic personality, the sense of a woman very much in control of her public persona and yet aware of her own unimportance.
She didn’t take Hollywood seriously whilst taking her work as an actress very seriously. She was bisexual, androgynous, promiscuous and irresistibly glamorous, even in army fatigues. The camera loved her and when she’s on screen you can’t tear your eyes away from her. Groom’s Dietrich is poised, glacial, glittering in that famous beaded dress, hair like a blonde helmet.
As a self-exiled German, living and working in America, when Dietrich offered to entertain the American troops it was an enormous statement to be making, and this show’s focus on that period of her life gives it a freshness and contemporary resonance that, whilst never overplayed, is ever present as we are taken through the Allied liberation of her home city of Berlin. Groom’s beautiful rendition of ‘Where Have All The Flowers Gone?’ will have you in tears.
But there’s plenty of humour, too, to counterpoint the tragedy, and Groom is never anything but utterly convincing as Marlene, a woman who never gave anything away yet still managed to remain endlessly vulnerable. The reality of her position as not just an icon but someone with a strong sense of duty, a world citizen (she had both German and American citizenship), comes across strongly in the narrative Groom offers and his performance throughout is as bewitching and sublime as the woman herself.
With a tour that takes in New York and Australia, if you can catch this show, do. It’s truly magical.
Review by Jonathan Kemp
Queerguru London Correspondent Jonathan Kemp writes fiction and non-fiction and teaches creative writing at Middlesex University. He is the author of two novels – London Triptych (2010), which won the 2011 Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award, and Ghosting (2015) – and the short-story collection Twentysix. (2011, all published by Myriad Editions). Non-fiction works include The Penetrated Male (2012) and Homotopia?: Gay Identity, Sameness and the Politics of Desire (2015, both Punctum Books).
