Adding insult to innuendo

Duckie, the cult gay club night from south London, takes table dancing to the Barbican. Is the City ready for this?

After hugely successful regular appearances at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern, a crumbling pub in south London where drag queens have trodden the boards for generations, Duckie, the pub's resident club night, brings its seasonal camp cabaret show to the Barbican.

The evening serves up tailor-made table-top shows to the audience, who, having booked a table for eight, spend their allotted "duckie dollars" on a selection of 30 cabaret acts from the show's menu. Each table gets 50 duckie dollars.

"It's a joke at the expense of corporate entertainment and sex entertainment," says Marisa Carnesky, who devised the show, originally called C'est Vauxhall!, for Christmas last year with her fellow performers, Ursula Martinez, Christopher Green and Miss High Leg Kick.

The four artistes perform five-minute shows, costing between one and 10 "dollars". Duckie's founder, Simon Casson, says: "It costs just one dollar for Miss High Leg Kick to get up on top of your table and kick her leg up in the air. But if you want something more substantial - say, you want to be insulted - it costs more. Ursula [Martinez] is the best at that. She blindfolds the eight people at the table and insults them viciously. It's one of our most popular acts."

When he's not performing with Duckie, Green climbs into costume either as Tina C, a country-music drag queen (a cabaret draw in her own right), or as Ida Barr, a hip-hop diva. Miss High Leg Kick also has diva credentials, running a disco in Soho called Shinky Shonky.

The regulars are joined on alternate nights by special "dish of the day" guest-star artistes: the magician Paul Kieve, the fire artist Lucifire, the gay cabaret star Stuart Alexander and Madame Galina, a ballet dancer with a difference.

A trip to Paris has proved a big influence on the show. "We went to the Moulin Rouge and other nightspots," Carnesky says. "We looked at the erotic revue shows, these really grand spectacles that are ridiculous: pure entertainment featuring live horses, showgirls with huge headdresses, girls wrestling snakes... Then we looked at table dancing and lap dancing. We looked at the whole power relationship between the audience and the performer. Who controls whom, exactly?"

The cabaret troupe set about devising their own table-side entertainment and came up with a menu that includes "Live Sex Change" and "Granny High Leg Kick". "But we don't do erotic dancing," Carnesky says: "there's no nudity. Instead, we play around with the absurdity of entertainment, the sale of bodies, and how far performers are prepared to go with their bizarre little acts - from vaudeville to ventriloquism, magic to burlesque."

Carnesky, who has a dragon tattoo covering her back, does a range of routines including "Stilettos of Death", "Girl-on-Girl Mexican Wrestling" and "The Woman Who Burnt Her Chicken". What is important, she says, is "the name of the act, not the showgirl". One hesitates to wonder what is for dessert.

'C'est Barbican!', The Pit, Barbican, London EC2 (0845 120 7550) 11 December to 4 January 2004