‘Stripped, lipsticked and tricked out on a Friday night’
“Welcome to the Roses of Elagabalus, Illygalabus, labubu,” slurs a vision: a seemingly 15-foot-tall Jessica Rabbit made flesh, as she extends a purple-gloved hand holding a bottle of poppers over our £14 cocktails. Yes, that’s right, Dalston has a new bitch in town.
The Divine, joining the strip a couple of months ago, is the newest in the literal long line of queer venues. Roses (we have to abbrev) celebrated its first birthday a couple of weeks ago, but it is new for me, and therefore, for you.
Tempted in as I follow Robyn Herfellow around the city, picking them out from the crowd with their bright red topknot, sequins scattering like dandruff from their shoulders, or the appalled and uncomfortable laughs tittering out from their audience members. I think I’m in love, dear reader. The first night of their two-week midweek residency means a Wednesday is quickly stripped, lipsticked and tricked out into a Friday night as the good times roll.
But back to Elagabalus, the Roman emperor who was accused of prostitution, sun worship and deadly floristry (my kind of girl). But ‘girl’ is a loaded pronoun, with North Hertfordshire Museum in Hitchin (allies in surprising places) marking the potentially trans emperor’s coin she/her. Have a Google; it’s a tale most salacious. As always with these debates, I don’t see who it harms, so I’ll be following suit.
If Elly had a bar in the 21st century, in Dalston (a stretch, I know), this would be it. Formerly a video store, with a club downstairs, James Nasmyth and Camille Jetzer have nested themselves in with an eye for detail and flair. Domhnall Nolan’s design throughout is delectable. A strip bar, hemmed in by little booths and chamfered arches, welcomes you; cocktails are served in rippled versions of the Guu pots (would have been in my bag if I had a larger one). Pinks and blushes, imperial busts with lipstick kisses, and the DETAILS: curtains hung with little chains and daggers (“buttplugs for ants”), cassettes behind the bar. It’s all bloody sumptuous. Pop in for a swish drink, or delve down to the unseen depths for dancing at the weekend in a tiled version of a sauna. See it to believe it, clearly, but do not photograph it, as stickers are provided.
A glamazon in ruched black, with legs that just don’t stop, beckons us through, down a small ramp (all step-free so far), and into a large living room dotted with tables, a stage with double leopard print in pink, and a black shiny piano. More curtains, more fringe, nicely selected paintings. It is like visiting your rich uncle’s house and having your first martini with his “friend” Alejandro. No? Nobody else?
A shift to a side table (for my partner’s 32-year-old ailing back), more drinks follow. Careful, my friend, as there is always some twinkling elf at your elbow ready to ply you with delicacies, but the bill must always be paid. Sober Salome gives a gruesome-hued tang, while the Sorel-tini has an herbaceous palette. Boulevardiers and banana Old Fashioneds will take your eyebrows off, although the middling-priced wines might be more practical for the ongoing entertainment.
Herfellow is a cabaret legend with a deeply disquieting onstage presence. Playing piano like an angel and singing like a 30-a-day smoker, we are later informed that on this, the first night of their residency their parents and brother are at the table next to us. “My brother’s favourite pastime is watching my parents’ reactions to me telling jokes about my butthole”, and OH, are there plenty. However, the evening is not all smut; more accurately, the evening is smut and other things.
We get Mizz Frizzled (Magic School Bus, anyone?) through various eras, with Herfellow providing two songs that end in tragedy: one about Francis Anderson, the famous (?) 1920s billiards player with a secret, and Bavarian “Swan King” Ludwig II. Both are delivered with their quintessential Sally Bowles off-kilter stagger, sequinned cape swishing, white face bobbing around, fingers you-know-what-ing, and a demonic grin peering over the keys.
Herfellow’s partner in crime is our Jessica Rabbit, the antipodean Cazeleon. Fairly appraising herself as having “many talents that I can do pretty averagely”, she struts and simpers in best Marlene Dietrich fashion. The song choices are ambitious and, although struggling vocally at George Michael’s Amazing (who wouldn’t?), we get gutsy renditions of Nat King Cole’s Nature Boy and Sinatra’s Fly Me to the Moon and That’s Life. A confessional and uplifting conversational presence pulls you further into this beguiling siren’s orbit.
The pair threaten space, “it’s time to penetrate the stratosphere”, take us to Hollywood (Madonna), “Harvey Weinstein, you bastard” shouted straight into an audience member’s face, and some original music breaks up the covers. Discussions of the trials and tribulations of queer and trans youth, and our unusual coping mechanisms (piss play, for example), do so even more. Cazeleon, leaning over the piano while lambasting some second-act latecomers (“you’re new”), sipping a blood-coloured drink while gazing slit-eyed and venomous, adds some needed salt to all that love-is-love.
Yet this is dinner theatre, darling, and I’m all done talking about theatre. Really, the less I say about the food, the better, if I’m honest (which I must be). £48.35 gets you three mussels and a chewy scallop, a mournfully petite bowl of Thai curry (four prawns and loudly slurping noodles), and some admittedly very nice homemade mango sorbet (and a fantastic cabaret show of course). Two more little bowls would make the whole offering feel less unfed and underfunded.
Sweeping swiftly on, come for the drinks and every Wednesday the Bonnie and Clyde of East London will be dazzling and diverting; after two weeks another set will slip and slide in. The delicious mix of high-end plush and pass-around poppers is why Dalston’s queer nightlife is one of the few bucking the trend of closure and shrinkage. 1,800 years later, Elly, looking up from wherever she is, would smile beatifically on the affair (setting aside the morsels). This den of good taste, with splatters of iniquity, truly lives up to its namesake’s infamy.
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