Reviews

Review: Bourgeois & Maurice – Style Over Substance (Soho Theatre)

The standoffish duo return to the Soho Theatre for a comedic tour-de-force

© Guto

Given how much they generally seem to dislike other people, it is perhaps surprising to report what a life affirming delight Bourgeois & Maurice's current show at Soho Theatre is. Subtitled Style Over Substance, it is a hugely funny, pleasantly jaundiced retrospective.

Looking back over the last decade, they marvel – as do we – that they're still alive and performing together: Bourgeois is endlessly witty but also (hilariously) bitter to the point of toxicity, while a pregnant Maurice Maurice – yes that's her correct name, this is not a typo – just wants to bash away at the piano and continue failing to connect with other human beings, blithely unable to comprehend the ramifications of having another life growing inside her.

It's as though Kit & The Widow and Hedwig & The Angry Inch had a love child, and the result is often startlingly funny, but also weirdly charming. They are superb songwriters, and their repertoire encompasses electropop (the ear worm closing number "Knickers In A Twist"), anthemic singalongs ("British Values", where coruscatingly cynical lyrics sit on top of a deceptively sunny melody), glam rock, and torch songs. An exquisitely mournful number about not being invited to chemsex parties is a particular highlight ("I'm not saying I want twelve d*cks in my a*se / I'm just saying it might be nice to be asked"), performed with a dead pan panache that raises passive aggression to an art form. There is also a song about Ritalin that is as terrifying as it is hilarious.

With a towering beehive, exquisite froideur and more make up than a drag queen, Liv Morris' Maurice is a fascinating creation, managing to keep up an air of ongoing disdain even as she's dancing like a maniac, while George Heyworth, as the marginally more user friendly but just as screwed up and heavily made up Bourgeois, is a hugely watchable mixture of cute and mean spirited. They are a winning combination, and this is 75 minutes of poisonous pleasure. Go and see them, but don't expect them to thank you for it.

Bourgeois & Maurice: Style Over Substance runs at the Soho Theatre until 26 August.