Tearing off a strip

Burlesque is back, and it's in the West End. But, warns Rhoda Koenig, today's version is not the ribald entertainment beloved of Depression-era Americans. This has extra 21st-century irony

Burlesque is back, it seems. A show called Burlesque, starring Immodesty Blaize, opens next month in London. The current doyenne of the ecdysiasts, the awesomely built Dita Von Teese, is writing a book on her technique, and Oxford University Press has published a history of the striptease. Non-professionals are also having a go. Schools for stripping tout the technique as a way of subverting the power dynamic, and learning to love your body.

Burlesque is back, it seems. A show called Burlesque, starring Immodesty Blaize, opens next month in London. The current doyenne of the ecdysiasts, the awesomely built Dita Von Teese, is writing a book on her technique, and Oxford University Press has published a history of the striptease. Non-professionals are also having a go. Schools for stripping tout the technique as a way of subverting the power dynamic, and learning to love your body.

But burlesque is not back, because it was never here. The knowingness and irony of present-day burlesque have nothing to do with the real entertainment of that name, which was wholesome, American and proletarian. For most of its existence, stripping, now synonymous with burlesque, did not figure.

In the mid-19th century, the term meant what it still does in refined quarters: a satire of manners, music, drama or poetry. But, when Lydia Thompson's British Blondes descended on New York in 1868, the emphasis shifted from literature to legs. The beauties' calves, knees and thighs were covered only in tights. This sensational exposure led others to follow suit, including Billy Watson's Beef Trust, advertised as "two tons of women", in which each girl weighed at least 200lb.

While sex was always the big draw, original burlesque was, like English music-hall, friendly rather than filthy. It was family entertainment for poor, hearty folk, for whom crowded urban living made the half-dressed human body a fact of life. Burlesque's period of greatest popularity, from about 1890 to 1914, was also the era of mass migration. Millions of men who came to the USA on their own, too poor or too frightened to visit prostitutes, would gaze longingly at the charms of the burlesque girls.

Workers from Russia, Poland, Germany, and Italy, still struggling with English, were also delighted by the attendant comics who, like them, spoke in thick accents. Their comic skits may have been corny, but they were holy writ. All the performers drew on a few dozen that everyone knew, including the audience - who, like children hearing a bedtime story, would indignantly call out a line that had been omitted. As the titles show - Pickle Persuader, Crazy House - these were not skits for patrons sensitive to feminism or minority rights. But what gave even the sexiest comedy its good-natured solidarity was its emphasis on male sexual frustration and inadequacy. The sexual braggart was shown to be all mouth, and the average man forever at the mercy of haughty girls and nagging wives. "Why did he die! Oh, why did he die!", a tearful comic laments, then says he's referring to "my wife's first husband". A girl tells her sweetheart she loves him, urging: "Take my arms! Take my lips!" to which he, unimpressed, retorts: "Yeah, yeah, typical - you keep all the best parts for yourself."

While most comedians were mechanical and crude, burlesque did launch some major talents - Eddie Cantor, Phil Silvers, Bert Lahr and Fanny Brice. Towards the end of the 19th century, popular entertainment diverged into respectable and risky fun. The middle class, many of them newly so and eager to distinguish themselves from their crude parents and grandparents, went to vaudeville, where the singers, dancers, comedians and novelty acts were impeccably proper. In burlesque theatres, female performers and comedians drew belly laughs from predominantly male patrons lower down the social scale. Burlesque was further divided into "clean" and "dirty". The latter drew inspiration from the raw sideshows put on by circuses and travelling fairs, and the high-kicking dances and smutty songs Western saloons put on to attract patrons and keep them drinking.Clean burlesque died and striptease was born in the mid-Twenties, when theatre owners were desperate to combat the appeal of motion pictures. (Vaudeville, similarly wounded, gave up the ghost when the movies started to talk.) At about the same time, the barely-double entendres of the comedians grew franker, and hardly more so than this exchange between a straight-man and a comic who says he is starring in a film called The Millionaire's Daughter and the Butcher Boy: "What part do you play?" "I deliver the meat!"

The origins of stripping are uncertain. Most historians point to a turn-of-the-century French act, Le Coucher d'Yvette, in which the eponymous heroine disrobed, got into bed and switched off the light. But the critic George Jean Nathan remembered being taken as a boy in 1896 to see Charmion, who stripped on a trapeze: "the lights went out with the person of our heroine still concealed in enough black net underwear to dress a whole present-day musical show chorus."

The best-known peeler, as they were also known, was Gypsy Rose Lee, whose much-sanitised memoirs became the basis for the musical Gypsy. As the Stephen Sondheim/ Jule Styne song in that show so rightly put it, "You Got to Have a Gimmick." Lee's was gentility. She removed items of clothing with, as one critic put it, "the delicacy and insouciance of a debutante picking the leaves off an artichoke". Lee, who could not sing or dance, said she went into the business because "I could be a star without any talent at all". She did, however, have a genius for publicity. In her mid-Thirties heyday, she appeared in the newspapers more often than on stage, posing for photos under the bubbles of her gilded bathtub, next to the matching bath-mat and lavatory-seat cover she had made from one of her old mink coats.

Realising that strippers were regarded as dummies, Gypsy brushed up her Shakespeare and quoted the classics to newspapermen, who were awed by her phenomenal intellect. In the musical Pal Joey (1940), Larry Hart ridiculed a stripper who sounded as if she had swallowed a quotations dictionary: "I have read the great Kabbalah/ And I simply worship Allah!... [zip!] I was reading Schopenhauer last night/ [zip!] And I think that Schopenhauer was right."

Sally Rand's gimmick was the fan dance - her ostrich feathers fluttered in a way that, even when she was covered from neck to knee, was thrillingly suggestive. Rosita Royce, with her pigeons, and the more aristocratic Lili St Cyr, with her "educated" doves, took the feather business to its logical next step. And, unlike her rivals, who disrobed to languorous music at a stately pace, Georgia Sothern tore into a strip with limb-flailing abandon, flinging off her clothes to a wild chorus of "Hold That Tiger" and whipping her long red hair across her face. A sub-division of stripping was tassel-twirling, in which women with awesome control of the pectoral muscles could make these adornments revolve singly, together or in opposite directions.

These top acts would play only the best burlesque houses, such as those owned in New York by the Minsky brothers. In the early Twenties, the Minskys introduced a feature that characterised burlesque as much as the later striptease - the runway. Extending the length of the stalls, bordered by lights, it brought the girls excitingly close to the audience, placing their ankles at eye level (for those few punters who were looking straight ahead).

The quality theatres did four shows a day, but in the grind-houses at the bottom of the scale, performers might have to do as many as eight, and the facilities were not for the squeamish. Gypsy Rose Lee started her career in a Midwestern theatre with a common dressing room where gnats swarmed above a bucket of beer, its lip ringed by lipstick smears marked, in eyebrow pencil, with their owners' initials.

Unlike more respectable entertainments, the performances of the great strippers are lost in history. Burlesque sometimes featured in movies, but the censorship that strangled any erotic expression at birth made striptease so anodyne as to be bewildering. In Lady of Burlesque (1943), Barbara Stanwyck and her supporting cast drive men wild in sturdily reinforced costumes twice as modest as those on any beach. Gypsy Rose Lee was signed for films, but the producers panicked, billed her under her real name (Louise Hovick) and covered her from neck to ankle.

In 1929, a few years before the dead hand of censorship closed round the white throat of art, Rouben Mamoulian made the most authentic film of the milieu, Applause, which recreates the excitement of sex-starved men lining the runway and lapping round the ankles of the blowsy girls. In the Sixties, perhaps the best-known movie with a burlesque setting was made - The Night They Raided Minsky's (1968) - but it lacked the genre's crude-but-homely spirit. Movies better served the galloping and mugging of the comics, including Fanny Brice, whose warm-hearted, rubber-faced antics are preserved in a few early talkies and in The Great Ziegfeld (1936), where she played herself.

The early years of the Depression, a wretched time for legitimate theatre, were the most profitable for burlesque. Fewer people could afford $5 theatre tickets, but almost everyone who needed cheering up could find a quarter for burlesque. Unfortunately, that very popularity brought about its end. Burlesque houses were always being temporarily shut down after complaints to the police from local censorship or religious groups. (Nudity was forbidden, but its threat or semblance was enough to call out the cops. If a ticket-seller spotted a censor, he could flash a signal at the footlights to warn the artists to play "the Boston version".)

But when Fiorello LaGuardia was elected New York's mayor in 1932, the puritanical Catholic had laws passed banning bad language and excessive exposure. In 1942, he outlawed burlesque altogether. The move was supported not only by moralists, but also by Broadway theatre-owners who wanted to remove the competition, and by property developers who bought up the redundant theatres and replaced them with office buildings. Other cities saw the writing on the wall, and soon even such famous theatres as the Old Howard in Boston or the Star and Garter in Chicago closed.

But burlesque itself lingered, the racy acts incorporated into Broadway revues and nostalgia-fests. Ann Corio had a greater success than her stripping as the mistress of ceremonies of This Was Burlesque (1962), and in 1979, Ann Miller and Mickey Rooney had a huge hit in Sugar Babies. The middle class, by then wishing to separate itself from its fuddy-duddy forebears, were charmed by the earthy, teasing entertainment, and brought their children. Today's saucy burlesquers may wink and shimmy all they like, but, like the society in which sex was a secret, real burlesque is dead.

'Burlesque!', Arts Theatre, London WC1 (020-7836 3334), 20 April to 16 July