Cabaret Whore Encore @ Three Sisters

From the sardonic title to the final appeal for donations, Cabaret Whore Encore revels in an elegant irony. Sarah Louise Young is the hardest working singer-songwriter in cabaret – she manages three shows a day at the Fringe – and her versatile voice lends itself to her precise satire.

Playing four different characters - a missionary from the Church of Cabaret, a French torch-singer, a diva of a certain age and a Eastern Eurovision candidate – Young targets cabaret's excesses and absurdities. Like Me! Me! Me!, which teamed her with Des O'Connor and Mr B, the cabaret format allows Young to lightly return to themes like aging, femininity and the pull of performance from different angles.

La Poule Plombée is the only character to survive from last year's Cabaret Whore: her tragic stories and bitter resentment against that more famous French Little Sparrow are laced with acid wit and wry comments on the tortured artist: the naive charm of the earlier characters gives way to the dark fate confronting those who dedicate their life to cabaret. In an hour driven by Young's sharp lyrics, it is her ability to completely inhabit each personality – as well as the speed of her costume changes – that takes this beyond cheap comedy into darker territory.

Young is sensitive to the power of theatricality in cabaret: avoiding the more serious musical strand that reinvents classic numbers, she uses comedy to shine light on the hidden anxieties of the performer. While she rarely allows the laughs to stop, her takes on elderly performers clinging to past glories, innocents sucked up into the false glamour of Eurovision stardom and the desperation of a Christian trying to reconcile their faith with their need to perform have an undercurrent of pathos.

If burlesque is defined as parody, Sarah Louise Young is part of a developing wave of neo-burlesque acts, influenced by musical theatre as much as vaudeville, using cabaret as a tool rather than an end. Of course, there isn't any striptease only a cunning and incisive sensibility.