From single sketches, to selected scenes and to full narrative musicals, Victorian Values is performed in a variety of capacities and can be hand-picked and re-stitched accordingly. See here for selected scenes, containing key sketches.
Written by: Kirsty Lucinda Allan, Mark Carter, James Malach, Desmond O’Connor, Jim Devereaux, Matt Devereaux and Ministry of Burlesque
Selected Scenes
• Sex, Drugs & Music Hall. This is a burlesque of (and tribute to) the Victorian music hall where characters come to life ‘on stage’ but also reveal their identities ‘off stage’.
Features a selection of musical hall character tributes and original pieces.
• Pret A Morte - Fashion to Die For. This is a satirical send up of the high fashion industry referencing the ‘macabre of the beautiful’. This scene sees Granville Fowler unleash his latest (and greatest) collection ‘ Pret A Morte’ where at last, he has fused couture millenary with taxidermy.
In this sequence, we also perform our burlesque of the ‘Size Zero debate’ where poor Flora O’Flaherty meets her end succumbing to the rigours of tight-lacing.
Featured Sketches: ‘Death March on the Catwalk’, ‘Albert is the New Black’.
• Pipe Dreams. Chasing the dragon in the opium den, Brigadier Smyth is high on his love for Queen and Country. In fact, he gets his jollies on the Union Flag itself. In the den of inebriety, Lord Dashwood (Earl of Hackney) finds refuge from the police and the Brigadier’s imperialist fantasy appears in full red, white and thoroughly blue form. Here, we perform our burlesque of Britannia herself – what value holds this once proud warrior figure now reduced to tabloid titillation?
Featured Sketches: The Trippy Toff, Girls of the Den, Britannia!
• Séance & Sensibility. This is a burlesque of Victorian Spiritualism where the characters fall afoul of their own undoing. In the spirit of demon-stration (pun intended), the dashing and daring not-so-heroic Lord Dashwood attempts to prove the power of Spiritualism by ‘lifting the veil’. Lord Dashwood will invite audiences to experience the phenomenon of spirit channelling via the rigorous wonders of the new fangled ‘Spirit Cabinet’. But alas, things are not as they seem. Much to Lord Dashwood’s horror, the veil is indeed lifted – only not by him.
Warning: Caution must be invoked for Lord Dashwood’s brand of mystery often finds many a purse or gold pin missing in action and more so, the virtues of one’s daughters.
Featured Sketches: ‘Sir Arthur ‘s Fairy Song’; ‘Florence Cook cooks up a Cock-up’; ‘Beelzebub’s Revue of the Damned Feat, Cleopatra, Lizzie Borden and a freshly squeezed Fairy’.
• Perils of Social Intercourse. This is a burlesque of every day socialising in 19th century Britain. The characters take a walk in the park and engage in sequence of ‘encounters’ including a narcotic fuelled slimmers’ picnic ruined by a drunk roller-skating menace, the impressive flexing of meat-packed German hunk, The Strongman and the horny antics of sexually repressed Kitty De-Winter Fairbotham who is hunting for ‘sport’. Fuelled by the arrest of certain sexual ‘inverts’ we witness the antics of notorious bum ruffle Granville Fowler as he escapes the police and mistakenly elopes with a lady dressed as boy.
Featured Sketches: ‘Roller Skates and Pickles’; ‘The Strongman’; ‘The Piccadilly Prowler’
