Sex is funny. Anthropologically speaking, it’s hilarious. The art of burlesque, in its most honest form, should attest to this; it should champion the age-old truism that with seduction, inevitably, comes the potential for grotesque humour. In this Corpus revue there’s a distinct lack of the bespangled props of tongue-wagging titillation. Instead, we are greeted with a brazen sexuality which more often appalls than arouses. This is burlesque slinging it old-school, recuperating its Greco-Roman roots with a jamboree of music, dance, and comedy. Of course, it’s still delightfully racy, with fetishistic heels, and phallic pistols, but there’s a point to it all, an underlying satire which makes it much more than just a pretty face.

The show is set against the twilight years of Weimar hedonism, in a mystical commune-cum-curiosity shop of anarchic filth. We are in a place, as Ryvita Von Teese, the grand dame of proceedings, informs us, where love comes to die. It is an affair of post-coital tristesse, rather than exotic foreplay. A vivissective jaunt into the "foul rag and bone shop of the heart". The three central showgirls, tottering in Gaga-worthy heels, wearily perform their routines whilst chewing gum and snorting lines. Another three sing a brilliant dirge on the perils of waxing in a parody of ‘Mein Herr’. This is neo-burlesque at its very finest.

Sian Docksey, as the evening’s impresario, is faultless. Her characteristic wry, observational humor frames the more frivolous acts with salient social commentary – a self-styled prophet amongst the razzmatazz. Though some of her turns were borrowed from her Ken Kardashian work, Docksey was relevant, playful, and remarkably assured – the very prom-queen of this vertiginous showcase. Yet the evening quite spoils you for talent. The various ‘interactive’ cabaret pieces are superbly paced, and choreographed. The dancers belt out their songs with real libidinal angst, the lyrics – a cast-composed effort – iterating a comic irony which runs, like the showgirls’ errant glitter, throughout. Solo moments are equally strong. Evie Prichard, as the swooning Galatea Divine, sings with a quite mesmeric clarity, and Fred Maynard, as the lackey Pringle, delivers a delightfully plucky reworking of Rita Hayworth’s ‘Put the Blame on Mame’. Another spotlighted moment shows Emma Wright working the pole with an invertebrate litheness.

The allure of burlesque is its promise of release, to ferry the viewer to a snug islet where anything can happen. Burlesque!, in its stylistic circus of acts, consummately ensures this. Saul Boyer, the Strong Man, bursts into an utterly surreal ode to Maggie Thatcher with virile, cartoonish mimicry. Jeff Carpenter, responsible for the brilliant onstage drag band, even contributes a hilarious hoop dance, with surprisingly seductive effects. But perhaps the most shocking piece was a certain recruitment skit which, at the risk of giving too much away, involves two girls, partial nudity, and fetishistic food-play. It seemed, perhaps, the only gratuitous act of such a carefully considered selection. I found myself overcome with a High Victorian prudery, vaguely scandalized as certain bemused audience members were themselves ‘recruited’. But this was a minor misjudgment of tone.  The night, in general, was pieced together with real, Fellinian flair, a telescoping of fantastic images in which dance itself was imply the refractive lens.

This show has legs. A whole, high-kicking bevy of them.  If you do one thing this week, it should be to see Burlesque!. Its fabled, if slightly soiled, fantasy world will leave you tingling with happiness, amongst other things.

Burlesque! runs until Saturday at the Corpus Playroom, 9.30pm