Fag Ends and Families

Simon Egerton's charming, moving and wry piece of cabaret theatre offers a genuinely distinctive take on a peculiar and peculiarly English life. Mixing impressive original songs and quirky scripted recollections, he depicts a family of ordinary oddities and sexual secrets with mordant humour and vivid detail, from an awful first cigarette to the slapdash make-up on his mother's corpse ('in life, she wouldn't have been caught dead looking like that'). As well as Egerton's rich voice and potent presence, it's the piquant details that linger: his unaccountable habit, as a straight working-class child, of presenting as posh with a tendency to camp; a heart-wrenching sung monologue of bereavement and liberation delivered as Turkish waves lap in the background.