Theatre

Foxed by Vixens

Alan Hindle | Monday 4 October, 2010 11:27

The doorman finally let me in, after VV started doling out the roofies, but just in time for Bernadette to sing about firing ping pong balls from her ladycannon.

German (French? Alsatian?) Bernadette peered out from beneath cavernous eyelashes hung with stalactites of mascara, while Australian-Filipino Victor/Victoria hunkered over her electric organ, waggling half a moustache and deceptively puppy dog eyes at her statuesque dominatrix. Also, there was Mr. Little Red Book, a weathered copy of Mao Zedong’s magnum opus but with goggly eyes and a curly black moustache that offered sexual advice for those more Pink than Red.

Eastend Cabaret’s songs are either freshly funny originals or clever reworkings of pop classics played on keyboards, accordion, ukulele, kazoos and musical saw, such as Devo’s “Whip It” as a Gothic gospel or the traditional Japanese-sounding I Love Rock and Roll. Beautifully observed characters and a wealth of material mean they can improv flawlessly with audiences and whenever bar staff break something. What was especially fun was the underlying power dynamic between diva and doting servant. While Bernadette is ostensibly in charge, owning the room and everyone in it, with the rohypnol song we see VV is actually the puppetmaster, enjoying sexual interludes her true love is better off not remembering.

Eastend had been foxing me for months. I’d been trying- or more correctly, failing- to see this show since July. Once, full of the warm glow of personal achievement, I’d speedwalked in just over an hour from Oxford Circus to Carnivale in Whitechapel, only to be told the performers weren’t on that night. Horrified to have the wrong venue I speedwalked to their other regular spot at Zero Aldwych in just under an hour. There I was told they were actually in France. I wasn’t even in the right country.

Last Wednesday, having finally reasserted my professionalism by turning up at the right place at the right time for the right show with my friend from high school, “Crazy Phil”, visiting from Canada, the bouncer refused us entry.

“Do you know who I am? I write for Snipe Magazine! I could crush this place!”

“Yeah, that’s nice. But we’re at capacity, so crush us from outside. If anyone leaves, you can come in, okay?”

Zero Aldwych, infamous for having previously been Oscar Wilde’s favourite social networking site and public toilet, is tiny. It’s essentially a glamorous underground U-boat. Fire regulations demand a maximum of thirty people be stuffed inside. That night saw the place packed out with fifty. The mirrors made it seem like a hundred.

The shrugging bouncer took my particulars, getting every single letter of Snipe and Alan wrong, and shut the heavy wooden door. Inside I could hear Bernadette warbling an educational tune explaining that if a man needs to ask “is it in?” then it fucking well wasn’t in, darlings. I had to get in! There was stuff in there I needed to know! Eventually the bouncer, watching through the spyhole as I pressed my ear against the door to take notes and cry, felt sorry and opened the door. Phil immediately pushed through the crowd to sit at Bernadette’s feet and tried to steal her whip.

Sat next to us were a gaggle of gorgeous women, employees of the Ministry of Defense enjoying a night away from the testosterone-thickened atmosphere of the MoD, delirious at having found two such hilarious women discussing important subjects: Bondage, the positive advantages of date rape drugs for the romantically dispossessed , transgenderism, vaginal ping pong, and the comical avoidance of rape. They’d also drunk enough to float the boys of the MoD under the table. When the Mistresses of Defense finally staggered off to resume protecting the nation they left behind three quarters of a bottle of champagne, which we commandeered. VV, Bernadette and their manager Tom joined Phil and I to toast the soused spies’s generosity and discuss Eastend Cabaret’s future ambitions.

You need a larger venue, I said. They agreed and told me plans were afoot for larger spaces, more frequent shows, animation projects featuring Mr. Little Red Book and themselves, as well as a larger, more substantial production that could showcase all the material they didn’t have room for in three fifteen-minute sets.

A happy end, then, to months of frustration and the discovery of a place with glass panels fronting the unisexual toilet booths so everyone can watch you pee. (I had my back turned, so I didn’t notice the apparent “frosting mechanism” that clouds the glass when you lock the door. In my heart there is no frosting mechanism. The warm spirit of Oscar Wilde demands an openness and spirit of debauchery in the post-cottaging Zero.)

Eastend Cabaret is a hoot and I hope someday to not fuck up seeing them again.

Eastend Cabaret runs every last Wednesday of the month

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