Concert for Peace, Theatre Royal, London

Dame Judi slings it forth with pugnacity

Last night, Dame Judi Dench reprised one of her early stage roles and sang the title song from Cabaret.

Hand on hip, she slung it forth with a sardonic pugnacity. Sung under the shadow of Hitler in the Kander and Ebb musical, this summons to hedonism is also a biting indictment of heedlessness to suffering, and to the abuse of power. It is under more complicated shadows that it achieves its irony here, as a highlight in the excellent Concert for Peace at the Theatre Royal, organised by Janie Dee.

If the world was too slow to check Hitler, it could also be argued that it has been too hasty in going to war against Saddam Hussein.

The evening unfolded as a blend of rip-roaring musical numbers – the title sequence from Anything Goes; the hilarious duet from My One and Only – to reminders of the fragility of life.

To accept this war just because it has started is to surrender hope in the power of the individual voice to mass in an overwhelming collective movement of dissent.

One of the performers, quoting a writer, said : "We do not accept the logic of the preventative war. The only war that is truly preventative is peace.'' In a sense, the evening was alternately a celebration of what is best in American culture, courtesy of the likes of Cole Porter, and an indictment of what is worst in that same culture, courtesy of the likes of Harold Pinter, whose anti-war poems ("And all the dead air is alive/With the smell of America's God'') were intoned to a martial beat.

The case against war was delivered with a hushed moral authority by Mark Rylance, the Shakespearian actor, who, eschewing the more famous parts ofHenry V, chose to give us the Duke of Burgundy's long, measured, pained and unforgettably indignant plea for the return of peace to France.

Raising money for humanitarian relief on the ground, the evening sent out the message – in its passion, and unpretentiousness and in the soaring talents on parade – that there is a lot to live for, if only our leaders will let us.