The Double R Club

by

In the centre of a smoke-filled stage, an owl statue stands on a podium. Behind it a gigantic red heart is lit up against a velvety backcloth. It’s alluringly kitsch, yet slightly unsettling. Yep, it’s The Double R Club.

Run by buxom burlesquer Miss Rose ThorneThe Double R Club is a ‘darkly surreal cocktail’ of cabaret and burlesque inspired by the films of David Lynch. The evening is set to become a nightmare, but one that’s both disturbing and enticing.

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Sinister host Benjamin Louche runs the evening with a booming voice and a raving stare. Tonight, he is joined in his characteristic opening lip-synch skit (front-lit a la Dean Stockwell in Blue Velvet) by Tallulah Mockingbird and 2010 London Burlesque WeekBest Newcomer Ginger Blush (the ‘Louchettes’) to ‘sing’ Little Eva’s The Loco-Motion. His aloof otherworldliness is countered by self-deprecating humour and an easy rapport with his audience, setting the tone for the show. When a running gag enlists the public to respond to echo the inscription ‘You Are Dreaming’ on a prop coin, it’s difficult to decide who’s more deranged, host or guests.

Music is featured beyond the lip-synched variety. Forsaking her customary backing jazzers The G-Spots, Gracie channels lesbian madam Madeleine from The Wild Party to serenade female patrons with smooth improprieties. Burlesque bombshell (and coincidentally one-time Gracie co-starKiki Kaboom contributes a slice of that unmistakably Lynchian eerie tone of Americana with her signature tune The Pussycat Song, followed by sticky bits with cherry pie. Rounding up the burlesque contingent is the sultry Emerald Fontaine, debuting a captivating, if abstruse tequila bath strip routine.

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Extending the evening’s music (and weirdness), puppeteer duo Tailcoat Cabaret calls on an audience volunteer to assist their star – a sickly, guitar-backed green frog – in the daredevil act of feather-duster swallowing (far more perilous than sword-swallowing, we are assured). Their deadpan clowning is almost as horrifying as it is hilarious. As the frog makes its final exit in a bin bag, I am not the only one who has to prise my hands from my agape mouth in order to clap.

Of course, there’s weird and wonderful and there’s just plain weird. Miss Annabel Sings(of Eat Your Heart Out fame) spends her set masked and seated in front of a film projection, moving in time with the footage and occasionally tipping talcum powder over her head. Veteran experimental comic Andrew Bailey fumbles from one bizarre joke to the next, grappling with ping-pong balls and pieces of recording equipment. He’s likeable but his technique is far from honed and his tricks with household utensils leave me baffled. “You can do this at home,” he informs us. Well, quite.

Ernesto Sarezale, in his dressing gown, tells the distressing but somehow charming story of a lover who left his bellybutton behind. After seeing the last of his Velvet Tonguepoetry open mics, I’m surprised to find him clothed and sure enough the ‘Naked Poet’ doesn’t stay that way. “She does not have a willy,” he informs us, flashing his own from behind a feather boa as he mimes to a recorded version of his poem Her Penis.

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Guest headliners Trixie Little and The Evil Hate Monkey stun with their acrobatics and slapstick strip tease. The American double act mime (again) to Bonnie Tyler’s Total Eclipse of the Heart before breaking into a frantic pas de deux. It’s bawdy, disturbing, and contagiously funny, judging by the uproarious reaction it wrings from the crowd.

As the lights go down and the smoke pours in once more, Louche produces the ‘You are dreaming’ coin again. Are we? After an evening immersed in the Lynchian world of The Double R Club (not Erotic Review‘s first, incidentally), it’s hard to tell, and harder to object.

Double R Club. Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club, London. 19 May, 21:00. £10. www.myspace.com/thedoublerclub

Photos by Justine Trickett, exclusively for Erotic Review