Unborn in America, Vault Festival, London: A dismal experience in the Waterloo Vaults

The score is devoid of structure, the libretto of wit and the direction ditto

Jessica Walker as Ziggy in Unborn in America (Christopher Tribble)

You don’t arm yourself with pompous critical criteria when you go to a show advertising itself as a cabaret opera in the vaults underneath Waterloo station. You take your pleasure as it comes, and here it starts with the graffiti artists busy with their spray cans in the street outside.

Inside the warren of vaults you might be in Hogarth’s London, so bursting is it with unruly, gamey life, and the auditorium which Ensemble Amorpha and OperaUpClose have chosen for their new show suggests Thirties Berlin - even before Jessica Walker, the lead singer, has made her appearance like a latter-day Lisa Minnelli. And the little band under composer-conductor Luke Styles’s direction reinforces the impression, establishing an anarchic tone in which the influences of Alban Berg and Kurt Weill fuse merrily.

There is a plot of sorts, best summarized by the programme: ‘The opera satirises the hyper-conservative language of US political debate, propelling an aborted foetus on a journey into the limelight, the Oval Office, and beyond…’, and the show has been extensively workshopped. All the more surprising, then, that the score should be devoid of structure, the libretto of wit, and the direction ditto: one just wishes that Walker, Andrew Dickinson, Lucy Stevens, and Robert Gildon could have had a worthier vehicle for their talents.