From the way Jessica Walker sidles on to the stage, you would think the mezzo-soprano was up to something furtive. In a sense, she is: her 70-minute show is a celebration, both tongue-in-cheek and heartfelt, of the male impersonators who were colossi of the British and American music-hall stage. Elegantly weaving biographical snippets with the performers' signature songs, Walker introduces us to the remarkable likes of Miss Vesta Tilley, who swaggered about her "knack of pleasing ladies", and Ella Wesner, who cheerfully declared: "Those who've never made love to a girl don't know what fun they've missed."
What fascinates Walker is the paradoxical nature of these performances, the inherent tension between propriety and impropriety. These women would boast of sexual conquest, or instruct men in the ways of the world, in a manner permissible only because they were in character as men, while singing at such a pitch (most of the original performers were also mezzos or sopranos) that their true gender was unmistakable. To what extent were they emasculating men, or actively subverting social conventions? Walker is quizzical and wry; for her, it is the "possibility" that their performances were transgressive that appeals.
In a trim tuxedo, with hair slicked back, Walker looks strikingly like Marc Almond, bringing her own layer of gender ambiguity to proceedings. She can be ribald, not least in her inspired collation of songs tracing the career of a roué called Johnny, and she sparkles every time she narrates a tale of real-life lesbian love. But she also movingly conveys the pathos of these women's lives: their desperate disavowal of "mannish" women, their confusion at receiving love letters from other women. Fans then were as inscrutable as the performers – although, watching Walker, you appreciate what fun they had.
