When Betty Buckley walks on to the Donmar stage to begin her sad cabaret, you are aware of her ageless beauty that avoids the selfconsciousness of glamour. She closes her gig with Memory from the musical Cats. The song retroactively haunts the evening, for this is very much Buckley's own memoir of a career that transformed a girl from Fort Worth, Texas, into a huge star in the US and something of a cult figure here.
Buckley's British appearances have been sporadic. She calls London her second home, though she hasn't sung here for five years. Her greatest claim to British fame is that she starred as Norma Desmond in Lloyd Webber's Sunset Boulevard, which she also sang on Broadway. She returned to the role at various points in the evening, to the whooping delight of the audience, capturing the character very much as Gloria Swanson originally incarnated her - a faded diva of yesteryear, whose allure nevertheless transcends the degraded present in which she now finds herself.
A note of nostalgia reigns throughout. Buckley's repertoire is astonishingly wide, ranging from standards by Rodgers and Hart, and Lerner and Lowe, country and western numbers, and lieder-ish art songs to texts by Emily Dickinson and Edna St Vincent Millay, written for her by the composer Ricky Ian Gordon. Their dominant theme is one of loss, and of the dogged persistence of memory, which causes us to recall what we would prefer to consign to oblivion.
Her vocal range is comparatively narrow, swivelling between a gentle, lived-in sweetness at once innocent and wise, and a rasping, domineering fortissimo. Her diction is at times less than admirably clear and her repartee with the audience carries with it a whiff of psychobabble.
Bathed in a murky pool of light, she whispers Mary Chapin Carpenter's haunting Come On, Come On, her hands raking the air in fragile desperation. She desentimentalises Memory in a way that is unforgettable, twisting her body into a shape half-human and half-feline, her voice ricocheting with the anguish of loveless homelessness.
It's an uneven evening, though it brings with it moments of greatness which make it all worthwhile. We don't always hear the best of Buckley throughout the evening - but when we do, the results are magnificent.
• Until September 2. Box office: 020-7369 1732.
