Show Off

Figs in Wigs present Figs in Wigs in a show about Figs in Wigs by Figs in Wigs. That’s about the size of Show Off: a ticklish cabaret about narcissism in the information age. It’s self-absorbed, self-aggrandizing and a bit self-delusional, but in the process, it skewers every single sod that ever shared a selfie on their Twitter feed.

If you’ve not seen them, Figs in Wigs are a bit of a treat: five twentysomethings in matching coloured bobs with glittery blue monobrows scribbled across their faces. They make ramshackle cabarets—variety shambles—in which the acts are all ironic, inane and stuffed with naff puns. For an emerging company, they’ve got a rare sense of their own identity.

In Show Off, they step through a spangled curtain, dressed in charity shop brown suits and neon leotards, and begin a perfect, complex soft-shoe shuffle without averting their eyes from their iPhones. Other acts include a pastiche of pseudish art criticism about self-portraiture and, ahem, "facies"; a long list of children’s jokes and a mass hula-hooping routine in too small a space. Between each one, a.n. other Fig steps forward to introduce the group in the most adulatory of terms.

Show Off is loveable in so many ways—chucklesome, charming and just plain silly—but it remains less than the sum of its parts. There’s more meaning smuggled beneath the surface than first appearances suggest—particularly its questions about the artist’s right to self-expression and self-indulgence—but it still feels slight nonetheless.