Georgeois Bourgeois and Maurice Maurice are a singing, dancing, talking celebration of live performance. Maybe it’s my proximity to the stage which makes the liveness so sensuous – I’m close enough to see smudged lipstick, green nail varnish, shaking fingers and torn, sequined seams – but I’m sure everyone in the room feels it. Bourgeois announces that the front row looks like it has no legs we’re so close to him.

It’s nice to be looked at by a performer, especially when it’s from between feathered lashes and high, powdered cheek bones. Bourgeois is acute and posh. Maurice is grave, her voice is soft and naive but she is very easy to excite. She can scream like the devil.

After my first encounter of Bourgeois & Maurice at Sadler’s Wells last winter I expected a show which would be stretched across forms, highs and lows and strategies to entertain. It is not. I also expected a glaring theme. There is not. And although I miss the effort which is tangible when performers stick to a single subject matter (there is something satisfying in reading that effort) this show Fa la la la la felt wholly better than the last because they seem at home. Even their lack of effort is pleasurable. In Fa la la la la B&M are a band, they do not have to explain their course of action as flawlessly as they did in Sadler’s Wells. They are fluid (but not smooth) gracious and entertaining, scattering us with expletives and snow.

It’s always tricky, the clash between scripted and improvised comedy, but B&M pull it off – maybe only because they are so clumsy anyway that it doesn’t really matter.

‘Are you all in a collective relationship?’ asks Bourgeois to half of the front row. He looks at my sister sitting next to me. ‘We’re sisters’ she tells him. Aparently she has not answered the question. ‘So... are you two in a collective relationship?’ 

PAH!

B&M are wordy, that’s their strength. The social commentary, the satire, the love songs, the casual twitches of the mouth thrown in with mic stand grinding and key slamming. It all moulds the show. The two extra musicians with them for Fa la la la (‘We wanted to be in a band’) sometimes carry B&M perfectly on their plinths of eccentricity and sometimes just make it hard for me to hear to hear the all-important lyrics (I’m aware that makes me sound square). But it generally makes for a good gig and I leave feeling that romance is not dead, glamour is something we can make and fringe dresses are definitely the way forward.