“Tobias and I wanted this to sound like glossy casino music meets a Bob Fosse musical, wrapped up in country.” – Orville Peck for Apple Music

A tentative smile spreads across Eddie Redmayne’s face. “Anxiety is something that drives me,” he says, quietly. “Ultimately, I think, you only live once.”

We are sitting in the gilded splendour of Fischer’s, a restaurant specialising in Austrian food in Marylebone, London, discussing the 39-year-old actor’s decision to return to the stage as the charismatic and mysterious Emcee in Cabaret. It is only when we settle down on the dark leather banquettes and order schnitzel and cucumber salad that he realises what an appropriate setting it is to talk about Berlin in 1929.

When Cabaret opens in London in November, it will be the second time Redmayne has played the part. He first gave it a go at 19, in a student production at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, where it played in formerly grotty venue, the Underbelly. “I didn’t really see daylight, and became quite skeletal,” he says, “and I remember finding it thrilling.”

Fast-forward 20 years, and that excitement is still there. So is the Underbelly – it was its co-founder and director Ed Bartlam who approached Redmayne and asked if he’d like to play the part again. Redmayne then asked Jessie Buckley, star of Wild Rose and Judy – whom he had never met – whether she’d like to take on the role of singer Sally Bowles. “This is all before we even had the rights,” he explains. “Jessie has this extraordinary spirit and an anarchic quality.”

“It was a no-brainer,” explains 31-year-old Buckley, over Zoom. Playing Bowles opposite Omari Douglas as struggling novelist Cliff Bradshaw, she will draw from her experience of arriving in London from Ireland’s County Kerry 14 years ago, and working in Annabel’s nightclub as a singer. “Most of the time, people don’t really listen to you, and I liked that,” she laughs.

Redmayne then approached theatre director Rebecca Frecknall on the last night of her celebrated production of Tennessee Williams’s Summer and Smoke in the West End in 2019. She said yes, too, and introduced him to the stage designer Tom Scutt, who, together with ATG Productions, made the decision to convert the newly renovated Playhouse Theatre, near Trafalgar Square, into the fictional Kit Kat Club. “I’d seen Cabaret done formidably,” says Redmayne. “I’d seen Joel Grey and Alan Cumming as the Emcee [the former in the classic 1972 film, directed by Bob Fosse and starring Liza Minnelli, and the latter onstage in the 1993 West End revival directed by Sam Mendes], and the New York production with Emma Stone. The only point in us doing it would be if we could do something different from those other productions, something new.”

Frecknall agrees. “I am always interested in how you can tell this fresh,” she says. “There are a lot of things bubbling up to do with politics, gender, hierarchies, stereotyping; with the human fear of otherness and difference, and how that can be weaponised. Eddie brings an angle to it that’s unexpected, an interesting conversation about who the Emcee is.”

Redmayne’s casting has, in fact, caused disquiet in some quarters, Scutt explains. “The history of that role is of one of queer portrayal.” Redmayne pauses for a moment when I bring up the point. “I hope when people see the performance, the interpretation will justify the casting,” he says. “The way I see the character is as Mercury, as shape-shifting and a survivor.”

When it premiered on Broadway in 1966, Cabaret invented the concept musical. Inspired by Christopher Isherwood’s semi-autobiographical I Am a Camera, it dealt with themes such as anti-Semitism and abortion in ways that were radical. The Emcee’s numbers, played directly to the audience, stood outside the main thrust of the narrative; the life of the cabaret became a metaphor for Germany’s state of mind as the Nazis rose to power. “The musical’s themes of role play feel like a metaphor for the era; a party at the end of the world,” says Scutt.

Though shaped by the aftermath of the First World War, for Buckley, Cabaret remains poignant. “Then, as now, they must have known that life is short,” she says. It’s the same mindset that’s helping Redmayne deal with his nerves about returning to the stage after 10 years. “If I don’t do it,” he grins, his excitement breaking through, “then perhaps I’ll just live with regret.”

Cabaret opens at the Playhouse Theatre, WC2, on 15 November

Credits: PHOTOGRAPH BY AUTUMN DE WILDE. STYLING BY AMANDA HARLECH.

Pleated asymmetric shirt, Thom Browne. Bespoke wool trousers, Norton & Sons. Socks, Falke. Hat, Laird Hatters. Ring, Pascale Monvoisin, at Liberty