Festival review: Eastend Cabaret: Notoriously Kinky; Underbelly Cowgate (Venue 61)

WELCOME to the lair of Miss Bernadette Byrne, ultra vamp and sexual buccaneer, where she will tease you with her talons and tickle you with her glossy black feather shoulderpads.

Audience members are flies in her web, putty in her hands, obeying her every command with a mix of terror, bewilderment and exhilaration.

Her he-she instrumentalist Victor Victoria is conversant with piano, fiddle, accordion and musical saw and has a great repertoire of faces. Together, they perform witty ditties about deflowering virgins and other coital misadventures in the European cabaret vernacular, with adroitly-placed workaday references to 21st century home entertainment and well-known supermarket chains.

True to its title, Notoriously Kinky eschews all coyness and goes straight for the single entendre. If you think their chanson about mistaking a stiff for a stiffie is particularly eye-watering, just wait until their megamix of utter filthery – it’s got bodily fluids, orifices, German discos, the full horror show. But it’s all fun and games and they send us off with a ribald drinking song.

Rating: ***

• Until 26 August. Tomorrow 8:50pm.