Through a fan of thick, black, fluttery lashes, Georgeois Bourgeois locks his gaze with the audience as he enters, with a microphone in one hand and an ornate, silver platter of marshmallows in the other. Bourgeois proceeds to thrust marshmallows in faces and hands gingerly take one of his pink offerings. The audience eye him with a deep suspicion, as though Bourgeois has plucked them from a gingerbread house in a dark forest and gathered them in a wicker basket clad in black leather.
That’s because Bourgeois and Maurice look like mentalists. And they are. There also happens to be more than a touch of fantasy about them. Bourgeious and Maurice look like a pair of cartoon superheroes who have been banished to some far flung land, with one hell of a vintage boutique, for very bad behaviour. Maurice sports a Power Puff Girl Gone Bad look with a square, black beehive and Bourgeois sheds his many sequins to reveal a cat suit that clings to every crevice.
This is one cabaret act that could easily rely on being trashy and fabulous and fun but they don’t and it would be a crying shame if they did. The two have more talent than you could shake a sequinned stick at. Their lyrics talk about everything that popped up in your Twitter feed that day and made you sigh: global warming, the Leveson Inquiry, capitalism, the Eurozone crisis. It’s just that Bourgeois and Maurice grab all the bad stuff, take it back to that gingerbread house in the forest and then spin it into 21st century cabaret gold. Maybe it’s beyond the 21st century; these two seem light years away from the rest of us.
In fact, you can’t help but wonder if the two of them can even exist in sunlight, although I suppose they must do if they’re singing about the DFS sale. Even so, they are true creatures of the darkest night and they will light up yours with a strange kind of star power you’re unlikely to see again.
