Two Acts: Isherwood From the West End to Berlin

The book. “I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.” That’s Christopher Isherwood in the opening pages of Goodbye to Berlin — a young English writer in a Schöneberg boarding house, photographing in prose the last glittering, desperate years of Weimar Berlin: Sally Bowles and her green nail polish, landladies and lodgers, cabarets and street fights, a city dancing hard because some part of it knows what’s coming. It’s slim, it’s readable in a weekend, and it carries more history per page than books three times its size — because Isherwood doesn’t lecture. He records. The dread arrives on its own. (If you want the full picture, buy The Berlin Stories — the omnibus that pairs it with Mr Norris Changes Trains — and read both on the journey between cities.)

From that little book: the play I Am a Camera, then Cabaret — the stage musical, the Fosse film, and the revival currently running in London that turned an entire West End theatre into the Kit Kat Club. Which is what makes this the only pairing on the route with an intermission. It’s a book you can see staged in one city and true in another.

The route. Two acts, one journey — five or six nights total.

Act One — London, two nights. The Playhouse Theatre has been rebuilt, entrance to rafters, as the Kit Kat Club: I was welcomed in through the stage-door alleys with a shot of schnapps pressed into my hand, cabaret performers already moving through the space around me — the show doesn’t start so much as it closes in, happening around you rather than in front of you. I’ve seen Cabaret in multiple productions across a lifetime of theatre-going, and I’ll say this with my full chest: this one may be the best night of theatre I have ever had. Electrifying is the word — so potent, so timely, that I fully expect to be describing it twenty years from now with the same fondness I feel writing this sentence. It’s now the longest-running Cabaret in West End history and currently booking into September 2027 — which is a fact, not a promise, so book the show the same week you book the flights. Do it on night one. Spend night two in the other London the book touches — Soho’s narrow streets, a proper cocktail bar, dinner somewhere loud.

Act Two — Berlin, three nights. Fly or rail it over, then let the book take charge.

• Nollendorfstraße 17, Schöneberg. The actual boarding house. There’s a memorial plaque for Isherwood on the facade — start here, book in hand, and read the opening page on the sidewalk where it was written. Around the corner, Nollendorfplatz was the heart of queer Berlin in Isherwood’s day and is again now — the neighborhood recovered what history tried to erase, and walking it with this book is the point of the whole trip.
• The Weimar day. Käthe Kollwitz Museum, the Neue Nationalgalerie’s twentieth-century rooms, coffee in a high-ceilinged café that still does newspapers-on-sticks. End at a proper Kneipe.
• The memory day. Berlin faces its history more honestly than any city on earth. The memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe; the brass Stolpersteine underfoot in Schöneberg’s own streets, several within sight of Isherwood’s door. The book’s shutter-click ends where this day begins — do it unrushed.
• The night. Berlin still owns its evenings. A cabaret at the Tipi am Kanzleramt or a concert at the Philharmonie, depending on which side of Sally Bowles you woke up on.

The glass and the bite. In London, the shot of schnapps they press into your hand at the door — and a coupe of champagne once you’re seated, because the Emcee’s willkommen deserves an answer. (Sally’s own drink is the Prairie Oyster — a raw egg beaten with Worcestershire. I love you far too much to recommend it.) In Berlin, a Berliner Weisse and currywurst eaten standing up, which is the correct posture — and a slice of pineapple for dessert. If you know, you know. At home: pour something cold and sharp, put the Cabaret original cast recording on low, and read the Sally Bowles chapters in one go.

If you need a copy: Goodbye to Berlin on its own, or The Berlin Stories for both novels in one volume — the better buy if you’re travelling with it. From Bookshop.org, whose profits go to independent bookstores. It’s an affiliate link — I earn a small commission and it costs you nothing.

The invitation. Read it together. Live it together. This is the milestone trip for the friend group that met in a theatre program, the couple whose first date was a musical, the book club that wants a trip with a showtime in it. Two cities, one intermission, history that matters and a night out on both ends. Group logistics, solved here — and the conversation starts here.