The Hurly Burly Show, Garrick Theatre

It’s not often you find yourself advised at the start of a West End performance that “mobile phones, photography and fellatio are not permitted”, but then The Hurly Burly Show isn’t exactly your average theatrical fare. The first time the West End has seen a major burlesque revue, the show’s move from a small cabaret club in Soho to the Garrick Theatre reflects a changing attitude to this ancient art. If you believe the hype, women across the UK, in bedrooms, boardrooms and the tinned-goods aisle of Tesco, are all shedding their clothes and donning nipple tassels – in the name of female empowerment, of course.

This female-friendly identity is a key part of burlesque’s comeback, as both last night’s show and its audience demonstrated. Men – some unsuspecting white-haired gentleman-of-a-certain-age discovered all too publicly – are there to be saddled and ridden for pleasure; if they watch it’s as voyeur rather than viewer and certainly not as client. The solidarity of the all-female Hurly Burly troupe (their lone male singer is jettisoned when the real action starts in the second half) is part sisterhood and part lesbian pyjama party: kinky, with a sideline (one imagines) in sound make-up tips and romantic advice.

Pitched somewhere between classic striptease and an MTV music video, The Hurly Burly Show is a series of discrete acts and dance-driven vignettes – rather like the Royal Variety Performance, but with more nudity and less, well, variety. Ingenious though the various set-ups are, ranging from a cowboy saloon (complete with the only chaps of the evening – skin-tight, buttock-bearing affairs), to a Marie Antoinette-inspired number which gets bonus points for featuring a bedazzled guillotine and diamante-encrusted dildo in narrative proximity, there’s no getting away from the essential problem of feature-length burlesque: the strip is always the same. Once you’ve taken your clothes off once no amount of marabou feathers or bondage-style corsetry can disguise the fact that you’re offering up recycled goods.

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Which brings us to the crux of new-look burlesque: tone. By getting the strip out of the way fairly early in proceedings, it allows us to turn our attention to the tease, which in the case of The Hurly Burly Show is enticing indeed. Founder and star turn is Miss Polly Rae, a Lancashire lass turned vintage temptress, whose 1940s aesthetic and finely arched eyebrows hark back to the likes of Gypsy Rose Lee. Like Lee, Rae also sings live – a rarity apparently in the lip-synching world of burlesque – and proves herself the mistress of everything from throaty crooning (a boudoir reworking of Michael Jackson’s “Bad” is kitsch magic) to all-out belting in everything from Madonna to Lady GaGa.

For those who prefer their burlesque with a little more contemporary attitude, Kitty Bang Bang delivered the goods, emerging from a rubbish bin to the strains of that classic number “If You Don’t Want to Fuck Me, Fuck Off”, before swallowing fire and setting her nipple tassels alight. As climaxes go, it’s a hard one to top.

Directed by William Baker - “known”, his biography tells us, “for his creative work with Kylie Minogue” - the show is all slick choreography and stylish visuals. Never knowingly under-sequinned, the combination of kitsch aesthetic and contemporary pop culture is a smart one, and clearly responsible for a rather more diverse audience (everything from pensioner couples to preppy young Londoners) than this back-room art has seen before.

In a world in which physical exposure is increasingly understood in terms of “wardrobe malfunctions”, disingenuously euphemistic, amateur spillings and burstings of flesh forever coloured with memories of Judy Finnigan, there’s something rather bracing in the conscious and deliberate revealings of burlesque. These are women with supremely functional wardrobes, for whom every hint, glimpse, peek or out-and-out flash is a minutely calculated and controlled affair. I’m not sure that women were ever in any real need of reclaiming their sexuality, nor that flesh-coloured G-strings are really the obvious way to go about it, but Miss Polly Rae and her Hurly Burly Girlys certainly make a compelling case for their art.

• Buy tickets for The Hurly Burly Show at the Garrick Theatre, London until 1 May