Tonguetwister vs Limerick

Jonny Woo's Valentine show at Bistrotheque was a funny one. He was on solid form, with an opening verbal deluge about things we do in love (like screaming 'Ned!' over the East River), recitations of the romantic verse of B. Boo and K. Minogue (his reading of 'I Should Be So Lucky' made me pine for French and Saunders's operatic version) and working through a few of his standard numbers and tonguetwisting stories. His guest was Alison Limerick, she of 90s dancefloor anthems like 'Where Love Lives' and 'Make It On My Own', who had a sizeable and voluble group of devotees reliving the glory days. For some reason I thought of carbon dating.

Theatre about performance

A drag act is a piece of theatre about performance – the performance of gender, of course, and, in the best acts, the performance of identity and what that tells us about society. A Life in Three Acts, running at the Soho Theatre, is a performance of a conversation: drag legend Bette Bourne talking to the playwright Mark Ravenhill about Bourne's truly remarkable life. The text, of which they hold copies as they talk, is Ravenhill's version of numerous recorded conversations between the two, tightened, revised and reshaped into a linear narrative of the life (not a million miles from the approach taken by Orson Welles and Peter Bogdanovich for the interview book This Is Orson Welles).

Bourne's story speaks of extraordinary talent, extraordinary political engagement, extraordinary experience of society, extraordinary self-fashioning. The conversation about it, by nature of the show's peculiar form, at first seems stilted, at one remove from itself; how can we buy their 'surprise' when a given figure appears in one of the photographs projected behind them? The awkwardness wears off but the self-consciousness remains, rhyming beautifully with the matter of Bourne's life by foregrounding of the performative nature of conversation, with all its rehearsals and strategies. It's another path to the kernel of drag, which is to say, as apparently the mother of one of Bourne's fellow squatters did while taking tea at their Notting Hill drag-queen commune, "Well, it's all theatre, isn't it?"

Photo © Soho Theatre

The drag show at the end of the world

Dickie Beau's Blackouts: Twilight of the Idols is the drag show at the end of the world. Radically yet faithfully engaging the form's classical tropes – tragic female icons of vanity, self-sufficiency, beauty and despair – it distills and compresses them into something sharp and glittering, yearning and forlorn, as compelling and fantastical as gender or a dream. Beau's idols are boiled down to a couple of signifiers – Marilyn's blonde wave and halterneck, Judy's pigtails and basket and so on – added to a consistent Crawfordy-Pierrot visage hinting at a common denominator of sadness in the service of entertainment shared by Piaf, Marlene, Britney and Amy Winehouse. He sings beautifully, with resonance and fragility, lip-syncs to passages of speech with expressive precision and dances with machine-like grace. There are coups de theatre – an umbrella full of glitter, a flurry of menstrual petals – and videos about the luxury of suicide and the uselessness of make-up and a wolf at the back of the room.

Blackouts was showing as part of the last HAF Highlights package at the RVT, revisiting acts from the Hot August Fringe. The line-up also included Alienathan, Nathan Evans's revisiting of an concept album he recorded in his twentysomething bedroom a decade ago, singing live, over the original 18-track backing, songs about indecision, despair, loneliness, ambition and spaceships; at times naive, narcissistic, even cringeworthy, they're also evidently sincere and likeable. Dressed in a sheer black sequined shirt, unbuttoned to the navel, through whose sleeves his arm tattoos were apparent, Evans's look mirrored the layering of identity at the show's core. This version was a fair bit longer that the piece's experimental debut at Bistrotheque's Under Construction last year; it retained its touching, slightly awkward charm but perhaps suffered at expanded length from the lack of a strong narrative or structure. The uncertain tone is part of the appeal of the piece: for the most part, Evans keeps his younger self at arm's length, rolling his eyes or using an urchin-ish delivery for songs like 'I Don't Know What Yes Means'. But the piece is at its strongest when he admits the sincerity of those younger feelings, joining his twentysomething self in a duet and ruefully warning that the loss of the love he found stifling then will be followed by a decade without – and bankruptcy, illustrated by the actual High Court submission Evans made in 2008. By the end, the amusing mediocrity of the songs had given way to the recognition – as my friend James put it in his excellent account of the night – of how sad growing up is.

"Sing along and I will consume your soul last."

It's the old, familiar cry: 'There's just not enough science in cabaret these days!' Okay, not such a familiar cry but a worthy notion all the same. Tom Baker's new show Professor Staymayr's Exposition of Wonders brings a spirit of scientific enquiry together with dashes of steampunk, spiritualist Victoriana and a bit of smut and crooning. As our host Staymayr, Baker flirts with an Austrian accent and snips of Schroedinger; it's fun but he's far funnier as HP Lovebox (above), Cthulu rock god from another dimension. His version of Creep was... something else. The other highlight was Amundsen and Slade's Sonic Sideshow – the duo have designed their own jerkin-like suits containing numerous sound files they can play with a tap, from animal noises sampled from the audience to movie fight effects. Good science. You also get Fancy Chance riding a dildo-equipped rocking machine and old-school bullet-catching and mind-reading from the Irrepressible Mr Flay.

Comin' at ya!

Following their fifth birthday bash at Floridita, Saturday's Gay Bingo was the last one for a while, and the last ever at the ICA. It had a 3D theme – specs were dished out; Jonny Woo used his patter to develop a mantra about drag queens actually being three-dimensional human beings, if you hadn't realised; there was a 70s-ish porn-ish vid with Jonny, John Sizzle and Ma Butcher up to stereoscopic excesses; and a skeleton, a stiletto and an inflatable beehive were dangled over the crowd on fishing lines for that genuine in-yer-face experience.

Not that the theme's really the point, of course. It's about the looks, the numbers, the crowd – and, incidentally, the fact that bingo calling is a subset of the peculiarly English tradition of nonsense-speak that Jonny often draws on – Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, Pam Ayres. Listening to him improvise quickfire stories out of a sequence of numbers made me want to hear him do a cattle auction. Or the shipping forecast.

Numberswise, it's all about the 69 – when it's called, it's on, and one lucky punter will shortly be spread-eagled on a table covered in drag queen. When John Sizzle got busy with a boy and a bottle, the soberly dressed New York history professor opposite me got a genuine in-yer-face experience she hadn't expected. See the full flickr set...

Blood, puke and Foucault

To the Roundhouse last night for Kleinkunst II: The Pleasures of Brutality. This second collaboration between the venue and Central School of Speech and Drama had the thoroughly creditable aim of bringing the performance and academic communities closer together, this time around ideas of disgust, brutality and the grotesque. The results were mixed but intriguing, underlining the importance of the dynamic between cabaret performers and their audience, in this case mostly pensive researchers rather than pissed-up revellers. In the words of Ophelia Bitz – who, with her new band the Tijuana Bibles, delivered a stonking new song about disappointing sex with gorgeous men – "You guys are dry!"

Several performers hit the grotesque and/or brutal nail on the head. It's always a pleasure to see Scottee sicking up in the direction of whatever audience member finds herself unwittingly pinned to him via makeshift tablecloth (see pic) - apologies for head blocking view, though it is Marisa Carnesky's. Carnesky gave a run-down of her recent work highlighting the long history of extreme body-work in European sideshows and carnivals, insisting that whereas some contemporary performers cite exotic ritualistic foundations for their piercings, brandings and the like, "in the Western tradition, it doesn't 'mean' anything." Owen Parry, who as a performer and PhD candidate personified the evening's intended link, delivered a paper on the importance of embracing the essential ridiculousness of performance (it being so ephemeral and all), comparing it the adoption of the term 'queer'. Holding to academic form, he frequently referred to Adam Ant as 'Ant', which was great, and gave a performance involving baby oil, milk, a wet jumper and a ladder that I couldn't make head or tail of. And Marawa, moonlighting from La Clique, hula'ed and discussed her research into Josephine Baker.

Probably the most successful element of the evening was Lucifire's contribution. Her performance with her husband Dave Tusk – nipples pierced and tweaked, blindfolds pinned to faces, blood extracted, shaken with vodka and necked – was not the kind of thing I'm especially partial to. Unlike the camera operator who fainted halfway though, I don't mind it, it just doesn't speak especially loudly to me. But the presentation she delivered afterwards, rivulets of blood caked on either side of her face, was terrific: drawing on 15-odd years of experience, she articulated insightfully but without jargon 'the cathartic process of releasing the inner beast' from outer beauty, the value of the body in the digital age and the consoling fact that "audience adulation is a most effective analgesic".

Impressively curated as the programme was by Central's Jay Stewart and Andrew Lavender, the cabaret night and the symposium didn't always overlap harmoniously – rounding the night off with a timed workshop discussion rather than an invitation to the bar was probably a mistake – but the underlying impulse seems vital. Perhaps next time round a way could be found to improve what Stewart endearingly called "the Foucauldian technology of the space" and encourage academic presentations with elements of performance, or performances showcasing the fruits of research, rather than maintaining a division between the two. Less dry, perhaps.

Heart-fisting at the V&A

Big fun last night: Making a Scene, the sprawling queer performance evening at the V&A planned by Tim Redfern – aka Timberlina, looking sharp all night in yellow-and-black polka dot blouse, weilding a clipboard. George Chakravarthi's queer, black moving-image take on Manet's Olympia set the tone at the grand main entrance; then you prowled the museum-turned-venue in search of the riches distributed throughout (not always easy with the V&A's maps – there were one or two spots marked on the programme that we failed to find).

Best use of the space was the one-on-one art cruising: you were given a hankie and instructions to eye up matching potential performers. I got lucky in the Sacred Silver section. Benjamin Sebastian unbuttoned his waistcoat and opened his heart: a red PVC one on his shirt with an elasticated sphincter. Working my fingers then forearm in, I eventually reached a piece of folded paper containing an anecdote about sexual ennui, read it to him as he looked into my eyes, then left, feeling satisfied and sad.

Other highlights: David Hoyle giving a drawing class in the sculpture hall; Chris Green delivering Oscar Wilde's lecture to art students in character; Dickie Beau shedding his outer clown for his inner activist. And getting distracted by the fashion gallery, which should surely include the fantastic full-body number pictured.