The magic of Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo

Drag isn’t what it was. Pantomime dames, character actors and any number of sketch-show comedians had fun dressing up as harridans or movie stars (check out Benny Hill’s unforgettable Elizabeth Taylor) but those old-school travesti turns have been out-camped by a more unsettling performance style that women are finding increasingly hard to take. Directors and commissioning editors tread very carefully when it comes to ethnicity, sexual orientation and disability but women, it seems, are still fair game. The trampy excesses of the modern drag wardrobe, the cartoonish, almost spiteful exaggeration of female features – haystack wigs, F-cup prosthetics, the whole ‘womanface’ box of tricks – doesn’t feel like an homage any more but a misogynistic send-up, reducing the very notion of ‘female’ to something tawdry and synthetic.

A big man in a tutu and tiara ought to arouse the same unease but somehow Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo manage to bypass drag’s difficulties.