EastEnd Cabaret: Dirty Talk

Everything you need to know is summed up in the last song: "Danger Wank." If an upbeat ditty about the frisson of public onanism makes you guffaw, then you will love this two-woman cabaret act. If that fails to raise a titter, you’re in for a long hour of smut.

Bernadette Byrne, the vampish lead singer of this duo, and her musical hermaphrodite side-kick Victor Victoria are obsessed with sex. It stalks their dreams, fills their interaction with the audience and inspires their songs.

Luckily, their honed comedic interplay prevents this from sinking into the grubby gutter. Instead EastEnd Cabaret offers up a bit of theatrical candy-floss – all voluminous sugar but ultimately with little substance.

Everyone is a ‘dahling’, everyone is a toy brimming with potential. While the songs about having sex with the Goblin King David Bowie from the film Labyrinth are entertaining enough, the most rewarding comic moments are when members of the crowd are brought on stage. At one point, Byrne picks two men and forges a man-beast for her to ride around the stage like a Rocky Horror version of Boudica.

Such charm is less evident during an extended sequence involving date rape drug rohypnol, or, less troublingly, during several tired David Hasselhoff jokes.

Yet for all its obsession with transgression, deviance and accidental sexual acts EastEnd Cabaret somehow still feels like a good-natured hug of a show. Albeit an embrace that you might want to follow up with a shower.