Review: MUSIK at Wilton's Music Hall

25 years after she first inhabited the outrageous Billie Trix in Closer to Heaven, Frances Barber once again dons the figure hugging bustier and eye patch as Jonathan Harvey’s outrageous chameleon. Self-proclaimed rock star, screen goddess and muse, she bounces from one lewd and hilarious anecdote to the next, as she reveals those she influenced during her life. “I Am Art” she declares - and who are we to argue?

For an actress of 67, Ms Barber offers an energised masterclass worthy of a gal considerably junior in years. In the aforementioned figure-hugging silver-grey bustier - and occasionally straddling a cocktail bar stool - she recounts Billie’s escapades through a non-stop, delusional, coke-fuelled, whiskey-swigging, garrulous ramble, in which she shares her life spent crisis-crossing the globe encountering everyone from Donald Trump and Andy Warhol to the Dalai Llama and Jean-Paul Sartre. Her strutting, swaggering, ranting and dead-pan asides are only parked when she takes a turn at the microphone to sing the six songs provided by co-writers the Pet Shop Boys.

The squeamish and faint-hearted may wince at some of the more vulgar references — literally nothing and no-one is sacred and even the aged venue is scathingly dubbed a ‘run down flea-pit’, (which many would argue is part of it’s inalienable charm), but the out-loud guffawing from the overwhelming majority of audience members makes this a must-see for anyone who enjoys irreverent hilarity delivered in close-to-the-knuckle cabaret.

Directed by Tony winner Terry Johnson on a set by Lee Newby, Ms Barber first appears adorned with an outlandish piece of headgear as she totters to her position, a dizzy mash-up pitched somewhere between Lotte Lenya and Marianne Faithful. Decrying her humble Berlin beginnings as the daughter of a mother who perpetually stank of cabbage soup, our journey is aided by a projection screen and stacked TVs which are emblazoned with Leo Flint’s stylised video design images.

Treading a fine line between dizzy and diva, grand and gaudy, Billie rarely draws breath between name drops and obscenities, but there’s something uniquely engaging in her outlandish and constant demand for our attention. With a few key updates around trans issues, this incarnation of Trix doesn’t miss a trick and even the occasional fight with misbehaving fake eyelashes and a fold-back earpiece seemed to fit entirely into the scheme of things, or perhaps that’s just the innate skill and stagecraft of a performer who truly knows her craft.

Musik plays at Wilton's Music Hall until 25 October