Fallen Angels

With his arsenal of cheeky songs, taking postcard humour to a new edge or making stinging observations on normality, winning personality and charm, Des O’Connor turns up everywhere, from High Tease to fetish dungeons. In Fallen Angels, he plays the devil, who seems to have arrived in hell via impish humour.

On the surface, it is business as usual. Gypsy Charms does a couple of personality-filled stripteases, Pippa The Ripper spins hula-hoops in amazing combinations, Sarah Louise Young parodies French cabaret anguish and trailer-park innocence. Des wraps the evening up with a moral, a song and a smile, and the diners go home humming “Hell Can Be Heaven”.

Never mind that all these acts are at the top of their game: what sets Fallen Angels apart is the focussed narrative and O’Connor’s moral sensibility. Setting the show in hell could be a jibe at Christian morality, a lazy laugh at the expense of a minority. Instead, O’Connor and his cast expose the hell behind broader cultural assumptions of pleasure.

Gypsy Charms sells her soul early, becoming a ballerina with a heavy coke habit. The devil gives her the fame and glamour she craves, and lets it destroy her. Gypsy twitches and snorts her way to the grave en pointe: a drug-fuelled demise that points a finger at amused Brick Lane media-types. Young’s Piaf parody nails the inauthentic miserablism that passes for realism in cabaret and rock.

Apart from being funny and skilful, Fallen Angels steps up the pace for cabaret. It is astringently moral, luxuriously playful and light in its darkness.