LA CLIQUE - This is London

When the London Hippodrome opened in 1900, it featured a 100,000 gallon water tank, polar bears and elephants. You won't see anything on that sort of scale here in 2008, but La Clique – an international collection of burlesque performers, cabaret artists, contortionists and acrobats – is still pretty amazing and, in my companion's view, one of the most entertaining shows he's ever seen.
The music is pre-recorded, but that detracts not a jot from the impact made by Montreal's Cabaret Decadanse who kick off the proceedings with a miming life size puppet which looks like a vertical slinky and is just as bendy. Two Australian guys in suits mock the seriousness of the English businessman, reading the Financial Times whilst executing gravity-defying balancing acts – before ripping off the pinstripe to reveal their muscled bodies beneath. A toned young man, bare-chested in jeans (definitely centrefold material) takes a bath and performs a delicate aerial ballet, dousing the front row with water, and a beautiful Ukrainian girl turns spinning hula hoops into an incandescent display of giant insect wings.
Then there's the amazing Captain Frodo (who doesn't look anything special in his tennis shorts but has a body that bends in ways which will make you wince as he squeezes his dislocated limbs through a couple of stringless racquets) and Miss Behave in skin-tight red latex who swallows a metal table leg and does awful things (of the ‘don't try this at home’ sort) with scissors opened wide inside her accommodating mouth. And what cheeky striptease artist Ursula Martinez does with a disappearing red hankie defies belief.
The first half is just about faultless, the second slightly overstretched, but this is still an excellent evening out, a welcome escapist concoction guaranteed to make you gasp.
Louise Kingsley