I still think of Hanna Schygulla as the icon "in the tradition of Dietrich"
manufactured by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, most blantantly in the dire Lilli
Marleen where she sat on a piano wearing a basque and top hat. Fassbinder's
films were a bona fide, and entertaining, attempt to understand aspects of
German history through the melodramatic style of the German-derived
Hollywood movies, William Wyler, Joseph von Sternberg and the rest. But
their squeamy irony belongs to the cold war, and they are interesting now
mainly as a record of west Germany in the days before Germany could regard
itself as an ordinary modern country.

Shygulla is now a cabaret performance artist. Her set, performed as part of
Scott Walker's Meltdown on the South Bank and repeated on Saturday 17 June,
is a song cycle with music by Jean-Marie Seignard, who also accompanies her
on the piano. There was no programme, and very little other information, so
I can't work out who wrote the words: some songs seem to be modern cabaret
numbers, others are very self-consciously arty; Schygulla at times seems to
be using the first person literally, and the texts might well be her own.
She sings mainly in French, sometimes in German, and introduces each number
with a partial paraphrase or translation in English, in the sort of slick
but totally implausible rhymes used in the English versions of Hollaender's
early songs.

Schygulla's performance is an intense mixture of camp, high camp and faux
naivite, surprisingly entertaining and sometimes moving. Away from the
dramatizing camera, and almost twenty years later, she still looks deranged
and unpredictable. But, though she is still petite and apparently in very
good shape, the cryptic sexiness of her film persona seens to have hardened
into the enclosed passion of a grand tragedienne. With her hair pulled back
tightly and adopting the manner of Piaf, she looks disconcertingly like
Margaret Thatcher or Vivienne Westwood, both strong-featured fifties
beauties who have made themselves into camp icons.

The first part of Schygulla's set exploits her movie-star status, starting
with an allegory of a creative artist, possibly a film-maker and moving on
to a direct memorial for Fassbinder and reflection on her own status. The
recurring theme of the set is how people are created and destroyed, with
special reference to tearing out hearts and mothers. Or life, sex and
death. Some of it is very funny -- a spoken schtick about Adam and Eve
discovering sex, a Jewish-mother joke disguised as a grim fairy tale -- and
some of it is distiburingly intense. But it all goes like clockwork, like a
movie, and the cabaret song settings are engaging in a completely separate
way from the texts.

The ninety minute set is perhaps a bit too long, because of the amount of
material there is to take in, not because any of it is tedious. Schygulla
did Lili Marlene as an encore, apparently at the request of some loyal
fans. It seemed very strange after the artiness of the main performance,
since it's an almost artless popular song that Fassbinder probably used
because of the pun on Dietrich's first name, and to evoke a pre-Nazi mass
German culture for his iconic heroine to embody among the Nazis. Schygulla
sang it straight, and cryptically.

She knows exactly what she is doing, but she's probably still not telling
anyone else.