1930s Berlin is a realm of glamour and sleaze, poverty and excess.
A lonely young Brit working on a novel is charmed by his landlady and her bohemian lodgers. He rooms with an English runaway and want-to-be star, the delightfully decadent Sally Bowles, and holidays on the Baltic coast with a repressed Englishman and his swaggering German lover. He is the elusive Herr Issyvoo, Mr Isherwood, Chris, Christoph, recording all in his ‘diary’, dishing on the city’s sexy, hungry nightlife, unable to look away from the violence erupting against Jews and leftists as Hitler rises to power. Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin is a sparkling city, perched on the edge of an abyss.
The novel, both cinematic and intimate, was reborn as the hit musical Cabaret. Michael York, who starred opposite Liza Minnelli in its film version, later made this acclaimed reading of the book, expressing beautifully its commingling of decadence and decline. Goodbye to Berlin is a kind of love letter, and an exhilarating farewell to a vanished world.