Cabaret                                                             The West Australian Spiegeltent            19 February

What is seen cannot be unseen. Yet when it comes to something as shocking, confronting, and sensationally smutty as The Freak and the Showgirl, that doesn’t happen to be a bad thing. Not a bad thing at all.

The show brings to Perth American Horror Story: Freak Show actor and self-styled “Seal Boy” Mat Fraser alongside the bodacious Miss Coney Island, a.k.a. Julie Atlas Muz. They are also man and wife. In their on-stage gambol, this joyfully depraved pair pushes the constructed boundaries of convention far beyond what you’d ever expect. And then some.

However far you plunge into the performance, however much you think your standards are smote, and that you’re well-nigh shattered on the deluge of their challenging outré— they bravely, faux-frivolously go that little bit further.

Bringing home what a powerful force the body is to delight, disrupt and scandalise, the show uses the camp spectacle of cabaret to lambaste the absurdity of so-called social ‘norms’. Insuperably, you’ll find many of your assumptions and ‘standards’ rapidly collapsing into a disorientating and titillating non-structure. It all makes for something cheeky, freaky, and fun. And also —you have been warned— very, very explicit.

If you want to experimentally tongue what to expect from the show, here’s a taste: minge-happy and minge-hippy super-cuts; a freaky BDSM severed-hand routine ten times more sensuous and strange than Fifty Shades; a knowing tribute to the ‘freak shows’ of the ‘30’s; an Australian typecast that’d win awards for schlock value; and an ‘inspiration porn’ montage-backed aria that compounds the heartfelt with pain, chagrin and irony. That’s not to mention a clever ‘crip-strip’ routine, where Fraser’s prosthetic arms are figured as just another prop to shiver off to get to the underlying erotic.

Amidst the spray of doughnut crumbs of a sexy corrupt transvestite cop, and in-between the full brazen flesh of quivering buttocks in a g-string, well— the audience just could not get enough.

An orgiastic apogee of Fringe World socio-political debauchery, future crowds should prepare themselves to leave the Spiegeltent slack-jawed and with eyeballs leaping from their sockets, feeling all sensationally and ideologically queer.

Especially after that finale. Think Emu beer, volunteer nudity, and casual promiscuity. I’d give the assurance that you get the picture, but believe me, you don’t. Seen to be believed folks, seen to be believed.

The Freak and the Showgirl will run until this Sunday, 22 February. Find out more here.