Fighting daddy and mummy issues armed with just a g-string and a few gold lamé bomber jackets, these Irish brothers are all about pushing the boundaries of taste and vulgarity with their “pertness”.

Cork performers Cian Kinsella and Cormac Mohally combine comedic theatrics with dance and acrobatics as they take on the persona of celebrity-obsessed but frightfully socially impaired brothers.

Equal parts camp and chav, their on-stage antics can be best described as something out of the TV series My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding, combined perhaps with the floor action on a Wednesday night at the Court Hotel.

Lords of Strut are not for those who cannot deal with the constant threat of seeing a man’s testicles through holographic hot pants.

Trained clowns and seasoned street and fringe performers, Kinsella and Mohally tick all the boxes when it comes to taking the “Mickey” out of “glam” culture: keytars, George Michael, elaborate sportswear, leopard-print skater belts, shaved sections of hair and a rather pelvic-oriented smoke-machine routine.

The constant bickering over which brother makes a “great kisser and an international man” and a rather drawn out karaoke-come-calisthenics version of Total Eclipse of the Heart might have become exhausting if it wasn’t for the eccentric lack of predictability possessed by the talented duo.

The characters of Sean and Seamus are clearly a nod to contemporary society’s self-obsession, namely grandiose deodorant advertisements. Yet what was striking about Kinsella and Mohally’s performance was the immense interest they had in their audience. It was truly touching to feel like the surrogate parents they longed to impress, plied constantly with 90s dance hits and lots of splits in a far more skillful way than any lounge room routine.

Begging the audience to come on tour and “be famous with us”, this pair make for a performance that highlights and amplifies everything that fringe is about. Not least of all the moment where Famous Seamus uses personal lubricant as lipstick.

Yet, as Benness reminds the audience in her opening and her closing addresses as “heart-shattered” Odette Mercy, being heartbroken shouldn’t end with wallowing in your misery.

Odette Mercy’s heartbreak dance is all about sharing in how great it is just to love someone. Even if it ends with the one you love just upping and leaving, as our confessional songstress host describes.

Mercy’s stage presence was as chilling and beautiful as anything she has previously offered at Mojo’s, opening with a lo-fi, keyboard-driven lilt as the Soul Atomics drifted on stage like a curious rockabilly/Ibsen mash-up.

A great storyteller in both spoken and sung word, Odette soon introduced her friends and their talents one by one.
Far from miserable, the show included songs from Chris Callam (The Witches), Timothy Nelson (The Infidels) and goddess from the “fringes of Fremantle” Lucy Peach, who appeared without her ukulele.

Nelson belted out a crazy closing piece of soul like it was the easiest thing in the world.

Mercy’s spoken and sung storytelling talents were the centrepiece but certainly rivalled by Peach’s amazing vocals that are laced with a brand of offbeat love-pain that is similar to that of Juliette Lewis.

Rapper Asap did a fantastic job of working with somebody’s prepubescent angst.
I went home and watched the clip for Sheila by Jamie T over and over again; a tale of three tragedies starring Bob Hoskins.

Odette Mercy’s heartbreak dance won’t dampen your soul; rather, it will put you in the mood to hear weaving tales of tragedy and heartbreak – and eventually, the healing and the loving that comes from it.
Odette Mercy’s Heartbreak Dance continues on February 13 and 14 at 7.45pm. Tickets can be purchased from fringeworld.com.au.

A brief summary for those who have not already been granted the honour and divine sensuality of Lucont’s presence in Australia: comedian Alexis Dubus’ alter ego is the embodiment of everything the non-French love to hate about the idea of the French.

Heavy-lidded and donning a black turtleneck, Lucont’s sneering observations of the chest tattoos of Adelaide women are painfully apt. We have no reason to believe that Lucont is anything less than the artist, writer and musician he makes himself out to be (greatest hits include Continental Breast-Fest). Yet one wonders if his jokes would go down so well if they weren’t delivered in an accent that is similar to John Cleese atop a castle in Holy Grail, yet terrifyingly authentic.

Diagrams of sex positions favoured by bishops, while amusing, are really just collateral to Lucont’s astounding ability to be as inappropriate as possible. Lucont is the shameless foie-gras of Fringe, and an absolute must-see. He may look exactly like a man who once licked my shoulder in a Parisian supermarket, but I would highly recommend chatting to him after the show.

Here Lucont assumes his position as purveyor of fine wares, including cigarette packet stickers that maintain that smoking is both irresistible to women and improves jazz. He will kiss your hand and perhaps offer you some of his vices (yes, he drinks a whole flagon in an hour and sky dives with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth). You will leave wondering what is so incredibly attractive about shoeless French perverts.

The musician and songwriter Joanna Newsom once described her harp as an artificial limb, speaking what the rest of her found to be beyond words. Confirmed by an epilogue of quotes from Hans Christian Andersen, Claude Debussy and Primal Scream, this performance by classical harpist Catherine Ashley and jazz harpist Michelle Smith is an unconventional exploration of music as language. It would be straightforward to placate the audience’s desire to see an elegant, passive mermaid be derailed by a creature from Hades. Yet despite a name that suggests a fight and an abundance of red fairy lights, the performance does not descend into a cliché of heavenly and diabolical drama.

Ashley and Smith each perform solo pieces that comment on their personal relationships with the harp, while the pieces they perform together draw attention to their stylistic differences. They apportion the pieces asymmetrically, chasing each other like shadows but always complementing each other perfectly to the point of implied telepathy.

There is a striking visual dichotomy created between Smith’s black harp and Ashley’s ethereal presence, sometimes only visible to the audience as a pair of luminous hands through gossamer strings. As playful rivalry ensues during a rendition of the Bond theme and Ashley takes hold of the underlying chords, the visual metaphor is carefully extended by the artists to include the music.

Ashley and Smith have taken the whimsy of mythology and fairy tale that surrounds the harp and provided dark and interesting commentary on the unstable notion of how a human speaks. Not a word is spoken through lips but the artists remain far from Andersen’s voiceless little mermaid. The audience is left begging for the story to be told for even longer, and one should hope this piece returns in an elaborated form.

Suitably, it opens with a violinist decked out like Persephone in a white cowl neck gown. What is a little unexpected, is that her violin conjures up a muscular male dancer, who interestingly wears grey cotton underpants.

What follows is a variety showcase of acts, most of them loosely tied to a “garden” theme: a dancer with a crown of roses on her head dances to the tunes of Kylie Minogue having her brains smashed out with a rock. The show also features fluffy birds, a hula hoop performer and a tap dancer dressed as a chili complete with a stalk beanie.

“Poison Ivy” puts on an extremely lustful adults-only performance to interesting backing music that is best described as a warped, slowed down version of the 1997 Turkish pop song with kissing sounds in it covered by Holly Valance.

Lady Velvet Cabaret host Lucinda Panties promises to guide the audience through the garden, from Eden to the “menagerie.” What is disappointing is that none of the acts interact with each other. A storyline and some more developed characters would have set the showcase apart from other acts.

The stand out act was a cute bunny in a gorgeous cream bralet and cape number, who maintained her playful persona for her entire performance. Her fantastic choice of backing song, Emiliana Torrini’s cover of Jefferson Airplane’s White Rabbit, brought through the experimental element central to a Fringe festival. This was absent from the other acts, which at times just seemed like calisthenics renditions.

Other fun moments included being dragged on stage and forced to “twirl” for a prize – I didn’t win because I was out-done by a lady named Coco who was dressed as a cat, and because Ms Panties wasn’t sure that I was over 18. I would recommend being so, for this bizarre and fun blend of innocence and raunch.

After one song, her floor-length bargain bin ball gown is taken back by the hire company. And so Meow Meow launches into what is an amusing, exhausting and often terrifying series of attempts to resurrect the glamour of her intended show, in full diva force.

Some of the strongest moments of the performance come in the manic narrative that accompanies her songs – mostly through the unbelievable stretching of her emerald powdered eyes with long lashes that could only come out of a Gerald Scarfe illustration. In particular, her rendition of dark cabaret number Miss Me by Dresden Dolls takes the listener on a journey in which you truly believe Meow Meow had manipulative affairs with older men as a girl.

Indeed, it would explain her somewhat deranged behavior at times, which includes purposely choosing unwitting bald men from the audience to shove under her voluptuous bosom. The audience interaction is cleverly crafted into Meow Meow’s life story as a former Broadway singer: the entire front row is dragged up on stage to emulate her backing dancers, and Meow Meow’s dummy double for crowd surfing is an inflatable doll that is clearly intended for salacious purposes.

Meow Meow’s percussionist and pianist are fantastic and provide further quirks to the performance. There is nothing stranger than seeing two long-haired young men who you would easily believe belong in a freak folk outfit provide jazzy lounge music for a catty raven-haired madam in a see-through chemise.

She may end up with nodules in her throat from growling to the high heavens, but Meow Meow is an exciting catastrophe of femininity and vulgarity. A dark creature with lips that look like Dorothy’s slippers, this is one very talented, although tattered, glamour puss.

It’s a real treat: merpeople swim in a moonlit tank, while the sounds of Serge Gainsbourg and Prince echo over grass that seems strangely lacking in plastic flamingoes.

Suitably, the creaking bowels of the hall are where The Yellow Wallpaper takes place. It’s based on an 1892 novella about a woman who, confined to one room, loses her mind and sees creeping figures.

This ghostly one person play crawls under the skin like an unwanted visitor.

It all begins when an unsettled housewife, played by Addison Axe, becomes fascinated with the “sickly sulfur” of yellow wallpaper in the house. Though the set does not include yellow wallpaper, its patterns are described in great detail by the unnamed woman. Likewise, her absent husband’s drone-like voice is evoked by passionately kissing a chair.

Along with the wallpaper, her mind and body begins to unravel. Or at the very least her clothes do. And, the audience is left to ponder, is she haunted or is she the parasite?

Axe succeeds at luring the audience into the dark realm where she is trapped.

At first, her personality is that of a sunny, chortling buttercup, and looks like something between Belle and the Beast in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. But, all is not as it seems – the clue is to watch the cuffs of her sleeves. Axe’s character is far more twisted and manic than previously seen in an adaptation of the play at the Blue Room Theatre last year.

As the props have been stripped back, the power in the monologues comes from the terror in Axe’s voice and the contortions of her face as the room slowly gets the better of her.

The production sits well in the Fringe World Festival 2012, with Axe’s twisted smile and filthy petticoat. It clearly seeks to exemplify the sweat, blood, tears and grime of the macabre Victorian era.

It’s amazing the amount of energy and perspiration generated by one woman and her few props.