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.