Published at 11:34, Friday, 02 October 2009

I may have been mistaken but I thought I saw a Nazi running through Carlisle the other morning. Not running to escape. Not running to threaten. Not even running to chase votes in approaching elections – Nazis don’t really do elections.

Running for exercise, I supposed – fit young fascists having long been renowned for obsession with full health, disciplined work-out, efficient vitality and shiny blond hair.

He was going like the clappers – which is technical joggers’ lingo for quite fast – over Eden Bridge. It was early enough in the morning for me to clock him as I drove towards a day’s work, bleary eyed and already looking forward to bedtime.

“My word,” I said to myself on approach to Hardwicke Circus. “I do believe that young man with the nice legs is a Nazi.”

Now, I stress I’m not in the habit of assessing anybody’s political leanings – or capacity for genocide – on superficial first impressions, even should they impress with great legs.

I’d never be duplicitous enough to smile sweetly or make polite small-talk with a stranger at a party, then form hard and fast judgements of enmity: “Friendly enough bloke, relatively charming but obviously a wicked Stalinist of dubious parentage. He’ll have to go.”

You just wouldn’t, would you? It would be unacceptably rude, inappropriate, wrong and – well, Nazi-like, actually.

No, I thought I’d recognised this particular Hitler Youth chap as one of the Nazis with whom I’d shared laughter, tears, song, dance, decadence, foreboding and a chicken goujon supper at The Sands Centre, two or three evenings before. Quite a night, all in all.

It wasn’t certain to be the same man, of course. I was bleary, cross with that inanely chattering woman on Radio Five and not able, while driving, to zoom in on fine facial detail.

He was running, not goose-stepping, wasn’t in uniform and Nazis look entirely different without their swastikas... they could even be Stalinists. There never was much difference anyway.

Had I been surer; had I been able safely to swerve across two lanes, slow down, lean over and yell from an open window, I would have done so. “Hey Nazi! Thanks for Monday, you were wonderful. So were your friends. Heil Cabaret!”

Theatre can do that – make you a bit light-headed and daft. When it’s good it changes your week. When it’s very good it can change your life. Performing art – powerful, uplifting, provocative, illuminating. That’s not high-brow. Try not to call it culture (which has turned into a dirty word in Carlisle). It’s just life.

Life’s messy compendium was all rolled out and raw, West End style, in Carlisle this week when Bill Kenwright’s Cabaret came to The Sands to take breath away and fill buzzing space with thousands.

Raunchy, ominously menacing song and saucy dance, booze, sexual excess and the party-time laissez faire in pre-war Berlin that had allowed Hitler’s power to mushroom, told more of our tendency to sleepwalk into catastrophe than any party conference speech ever could. A stark, shiver-inducing final scene of shadowy, murderous massacre, reminded with haunting precision just how often sleepwalkers wake up too late.

Life lessons, stomping good fun, tunes to hum all the way home and all wrapped in a stirring, belting package, delivered perfectly to Carlisle – culturally in two minds – of a midweek September evening. Marvellous and more than just lucky, I guess.

I really do hope the jogger on Eden Bridge was that same young singing Nazi who’d so shaken our two-minded town with his toe-curling anthem of evil intent. It’s good to feel that when art wafts in, touring artists stick around long enough to take in the early morning air, run in our mists to catch glimpses of weak, watery, autumn sunshine.

Additional life brings bonuses to any city. And we sure could use a life-enhancing bonus or two – at least it’s to be hoped we wouldn’t turn them down.

Perhaps that’s where we’re going wrong in two-minded Carlisle. Instead of bidding for UK City of Culture, we should be aiming to be the UK’s premier city of life.

They’re precisely the same thing, after all. Stirred to light-headedness and sometimes a bit daft, spirits lifted, tunes to hum, spectacle, dance, colour, shape, shared enjoyment of lessons in life. Maybe there’s the point we, the two-minded, have overlooked. In city of life stakes, we’re already way up there.

On a damp September evening, shared with naughty, sleepwalking Berliners and singing Nazis, it all became self-evident – we may not agree on culture’s impossible definitions but we’re a fingertip’s reach from life’s winning post.

Published by http://www.newsandstar.co.uk