Burlesque may be all the rage and Duckie's C'est Barbican show may have deservedly won an Olivier award, but that doesn't stop the tease turning to torpor in this depressingly inept show. There are only so many times you can watch somebody suggestively not quite taking off all their clothes and jiggling their breasts and wiggling their bottom at you, even if that somebody is a voluptuous Venus like Immodesty Blaize or a cross-dressing man who wears fishnets beneath the trousers like Walter. At least in the theatre there's a limit. In a club at midnight, after a quart of Bacardi Breezers, this might just pass for entertainment, but here it just looks horribly exposed - in more ways than one.
The difference between this and Duckie's show is crucial. The latter not only offers intimacy but also subversion, deviancy and satire. It uses the conventions of burlesque to say something about the cultural, social and economic exchange that is taking place on the tabletop between performer and spectator. It makes the audience participate and so stops them from being mere voyeurs.
In C'est Barbican there was a contract between audience and performers, a complicity. Here, seated in rows with the performers on stage, we are mere peeping toms. It feels like a safe substitute devised for people who would really like to go to a lap-dancing club but are too timid. If there was more wit and inspired choreography it might just get by, but the show relies on fey balloon tricks, private dick jokes, references to popular culture and an assumption that we are going to find a peek of tasselled nipple so deliciously naughty that we won't notice that nothing is going on. Only a sucker would pay £37.50 for so little.
· Until June 18. Box office: 020-7836 3334.
