The late night show currently playing at BATS is a cabaret act par excellence that doesn’t purport to be anything other than a rollicking good piece of entertainment. 

Raw, raunchy over-the-top Esther (Bryony Skillington) – a cross between Liza Minnelli and Elaine Stritch – lies spread eagle on a bed, chained by feet and hands and surround by an array of dildos, large and small. 

With her silent partner Gimpy (Byron Coll) on piano, she regales the audience in comic dialogue and belts out approriate songs with style and panache, revealing how she ended up being tied to the bed. 

From her opening number, ‘Please Release Me’, to her finale, ‘Nobody Does It Like Me’, Skillington gives a full-on, dynamic, power-house performance that is confident and electrifying and which is a must-see this Festival.

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Esther is more than a bit tied up when we meet her. She is fluffy-cuffed at the wrists and ankles and chained to a bed, wearing D-Vice corsetry and a sexy feather-trimmed gown. Her boudoir is strewn with anatomically correct dildos, a cowboy-hatted pianist dozes at his upright and once she has spat the dummy (I think it’s known in the trade as a butt plug), Esther sings – what else? – ‘Please Release Me …!’ full bore.

I’m tempted to say ‘bore’ becomes the operative word because it takes 50 minutes to be treated to more belted out songs linked by snippets of information that finally lead to some objective understanding of how she comes to be in this situation. The device could work if the songs were sung to mine different moods and emotions and/or the linking story was more interesting.

A New York American, Esther – played with attitude and a well-centred presence by Bryony Skillington, who I think is of Irish descent -claims to be a "reformed Jew" who still fantasises about being Jewish yet has dabbled in Catholicism after developing a thing about nuns before giving acting a go. An audition for a stage show goes badly so she seeks her fortune in films and, would you believe it, she’s fallen for some porn-merchant’s line that this is the way in.

Her thump-along pianist, Bryon Coll, is her timid Gimpy (sex slave) – cue a harshly sung variation on ‘A Quiet Thing’: ‘A Quiet Gimp’ – and when he comes out from behind the piano his attire gives proceedings a bit of a lift, but little more is made of the character or their relationship.

Skillington can sing all right. She can eyeball her audience and, in role, play covertly bullying status games. But despite having sung ‘Whatever Esther Wants Esther Gets’, something strange happens around the possibility of audience participation. She asks for it but when people are tentative she neither encourages nor insists. Maybe her "come hither – fuck off" persona is part of the act but the outcome is more awkward than entertaining.

I expect the songs are chosen to support the story (or vice versa): ‘Stuff Like That There’; ‘Someone Else’s Story’ from Chess; ‘Let Me Go, Lover’ sung very loud; ‘I’m Not That Girl’ from Wicked; ‘Listen to my Heart’; ‘Dance Ten Looks Three’, title song of the musical, promotion "tits and ass’; ‘There’s a Fine, Fine Line’ (between love and a waste of time’; (If there’s a wrong way to do it) ‘Nobody Does it Like Me’ … but they don’t.

Her apparent predicament is not well exploited for drama or comedy and merely telling us what happened when there’s nothing much at stake to interest us in the outcome produces little pay-off for our 50-minute investment.

For all its potential to engage through comic insights, pathos and poignancy, Get Cuffed leaves me untouched.  
 

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