News Of The Weird

“I might get a special catsuit made. Kylie likes a catsuit doesn't, she?” George Heyworth, aka Georgeois Bourgeois, is pondering his first show in the southern hemisphere. He's one half of British cabaret act Bourgeois & Maurice, along with Liv Morris, aka Maurice Maurice. The duo are preparing to bring their satirical musical comedy to Harvest Festival after a year which has seen them perform all over, including stints in New York, Greece, Ireland, and Serbia.

Obnoxious, witty and covered in sequins, Bourgeois & Maurice look like the lovechildren of Morticia Addams and Frank-N-Furter; strutting and pouting their way through songs with names like Satanic Organic and Don't Go to Art School. Onstage they wield lashings of irony and fake eyelashes as long as your arm, but it turns out that when they're not being Bourgeois & Maurice, Heyworth and Morris are a pair of staggeringly fresh-faced and well-spoken individuals.

In fact, becoming cabaret artists has taken them rather by surprise. Long-term friends who met whilst studying drama in London, five years ago the pair signed themselves up to perform at a Soho nightclub's comedy night for a laugh. “We just wrote some songs, to entertain ourselves really,” Heyworth says.

Their tentative forays into cabaret came at the right time, as the London scene blossomed. “We were really fortunate,” explains Heyworth. “We just kept getting offered more gigs and saying yes, and then suddenly…” “It became our job,” Morris concludes. At the start neither of them were cabaret aficionados – Morris admits that she had never even seen the eponymous Liza Minelli film until a year or two ago. “I definitely don't think that our style of cabaret is particularly harking back to any 1930s Berlin-type ideal,” Heyworth ponders. “We're talking about stuff that's happening now; we're not a vintage act.”

With songs about conspiracy theories, tuition fees and the GFC, there's a serious vein through their work which suggests they're as interested in politics as they are in theatrics. “We've definitely become more political in our content over the last few years,” Morris confirms. “I think before we kind of shied way from being too obviously political; it was more like social commentary.“ It's a change that she ascribes to an increasingly polarised political landscape, and to a media which provides ever more fertile ground for satire.

“It sometimes feels like you open a paper and you've just been offered a load of song titles,” Heyworth elaborates before Morris gives an example of a song they wrote about the News Of The World phone hacking scandal. “The main lyric is actually a quote from [a journalist] in the inquiry. They were asking him; 'What's your justification for hacking into these phones?' and he said, 'Privacy is for paedos'. And we were like, 'What?!'” They both look at each other and issue a cackle, and a flash of their mischievous on-stage characters appears for a moment. “We thought, 'That has to be a song',” Heyworth beams.