According to Reuben Kaye, the clock is ticking on humanity.
And if our days are numbered anyway, we might as well have a little fun. Following off the back of his wildly successful late-night cabaret The Kaye Hole, Reuben’s latest Comedy Festival offering is almost too wild to be true.
The inspiration for Apocalipstik comes from Kaye’s uncle, who began as an orphan in post-WWII Germany and fell down the path of a life of crime, with an interlude as a successful musical comedy performer in between.
Reuben Kaye – Apocalipstik
- March 28 to April 21 (except Mondays and Tuesdays)
- The Malthouse – Merlyn Theatre
- 7:15, 6:15 (Sundays)
- Tickets on sale now
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Combining stand-up comedy, bespoke music and cabaret, the show is designed to be a tonic in our trying times with a message of resilience. We caught up with Kaye to chat about the intricacies of his family drama, the Doomsday Clock and what fans can expect from Apocalipstik.
Where are you in the world right now and what has your day involved?
I’m in Melbourne. We have Kaye Hole tonight at the Meat Market. I woke up today at about 7:30 and went with a friend to this place called Inner Studio which is like a sauna with a cold plunge. Did all of that fancy stuff. Then I promptly realised that that was a stupid thing to do and went straight back to bed like any other reasonable human being.
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Like everyone at this time of year, you are bouncing around between all the festivals in the different states. How’s it all been going?
It’s pretty hectic at the moment. We came back to Melbourne straight from the UK. We finished the season of Butch Is Back at the Southbank in London, which was a pretty big achievement, and came straight back to develop and to get into creation for Apocalipstik and get it up and running in Perth, so we didn’t give ourselves a break. Our bodies are all a little tender and we’re all running a bit on fumes, but it’s a very exciting time.
Talk to me a little bit about this new show. Obviously, as with all your work, it sounds like it’s drawing on autobiography as much as the political landscape we find ourselves in at the time, so can you talk me through the origins and inspiration?
Well, I just think we’re in this really interesting moment in history where we’re all feeling the same. I think we’re all feeling scared. I think we’re all feeling trapped. I think we’re all feeling a little bit helpless and perhaps a bit hopeless and pessimistic.
I mean, it felt like 2023 was so bad Ghislaine Maxwell was grateful to be in prison for it and it just feels like 2024 is gearing up to be another shitstorm.
We can’t trust politicians or the media – the media is not reporting the stories that it needs to or if it is, then there’s no good news coming our way. It all feels a bit like we’re circling the drain of our own existence and we keep on seeing those articles about the Doomsday Clock being close to midnight – ‘we’re three minutes until midnight’, ‘we’re three minutes to two minutes to midnight’.
I thought the best thing to do in times like this is to make a piece of complex narrative cabaret, [which] is of course, as you know, the most common and well-received art form.
What’s the show actually about?
[The story follows] my uncle, who lived in East Berlin and is really this sort of scarred child of the Holocaust. He lived this weird and extraordinary life where he was put in an orphanage and left behind by my grandmother, who then took my mum and left for Australia and she became a couturier fashion designer here.
She leaves my grandfather and my grandfather leaves him in the orphanage, shacks up with his secretary … and his mistress is informing on him to the secret police. I went and met my grandfather’s mistress in East Berlin and she’s nuts, she’s a crazy character.
So he gets out of the orphanage and joins a musical comedy group that becomes super successful. He tries to escape East Berlin by trying to fake his way through a checkpoint, gets sent to prison, comes out of prison and starts robbing banks.
This is an entirely true story and that’s not even half of it. There’s so much more. I think there’s something very interesting and very queer that I related to about someone who learns who they are, based on what they’re not.
But also, it’s about someone who was raised to feel like the world was ending, like he was trapped. He was hopeless, but he was not powerless. I think it’s a life lived in fabulous rebellion, and that’s the only way we’re going to get out of where we are now.
That’s the only way we will feel we take control of the world now is this: through small, engaged, fabulous rebellions.
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How are you approaching all of this, in terms of the tone and content and details you’re including in the show?
Look, it’s a big ride. It’s fast. It’s incredibly funny because there are so many small details and amazing characters in this, and there are so many ways that this story relates back to us.
We feel that this world is so divided, but we’re all feeling the same: we are all angry, we are all scared and we’re all trying to be better. And the fact is, we’re all just monkeys who are descended from fish, who are all going to die at some point. Those are the things that are certain in this life, so let’s laugh about it.
Monkeys descended from fish, what a way to say to don’t sweat the small stuff, and yet what you’re talking about is massive.
Absolutely, and it’s also the rise of the right wing and the fact that we’re in an age where we are dealing with the imminent threat of World War Three. We’re in the age where climate collapse is absolutely on the brink…
We shouldn’t be having kids, we should be learning how to cook over a nuclear fire. And if we are going to have kids, they don’t need to learn French, they don’t need to learn how to do their taxes, they need to learn woodland survival and how to swim considering the oceans are rising so quickly. In all of this, the things that people are actually trying to focus on are drag queens?!
For tickets to Reuben Kaye’s Apocalipstik, head here.
