Women of Cabaret! Published 02/2026 The Mail #FEMAIL

As @DitaVonTeese prepares to visit Dublin, I write about the women who paved the way and kept the cabaret fires burning! 

When Dita Von Teese returns to Dublin on February 8 with her Nocturnelle show at the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre, she will arrive into a cultural space that has been shaped, sustained and reinvented by women for generations. Her particular brand of high-gloss burlesque may be international, but Ireland’s relationship with cabaret has long been defined by female performers who understood glamour not as decoration, but as power.

Cabaret has always been a place where women could control the room. Long before pop feminism had a vocabulary for bodily autonomy or performance as authorship, women in cabaret were writing their own rules, commanding audiences through voice, wit, physicality and presence. That lineage matters when a performer like Von Teese steps onto an Irish stage.

My own fascination with cabaret began early, through Bob Fosse’s film Cabaret, which mesmerised me as a child with its costumes, choreography and theatrical excess. Years later, that fascination would turn into a career producing cabaret shows and writing about the form. What I came to understand over time was that cabaret survives not because it is fashionable, but because it adapts. Women have consistently been the ones pushing that evolution forward.

One of the earliest and most influential figures in Irish cabaret was Maureen Potter. Performing at Dublin’s Theatre Royal during its mid-20th-century heyday, Potter was a comic force with enormous popular reach. She did not play decorative roles. She commanded the stage, delivering humour with authority and timing that made her one of the most recognisable performers of her generation.

The Theatre Royal itself was a vast Art Deco venue that hosted international stars, but it was performers like Potter who anchored it in Irish popular culture. Her success demonstrated that women could dominate variety entertainment on the biggest stages in the country, shaping audience taste rather than responding to it. Cabaret at this scale was not niche or underground. It was central to national entertainment, and women were at its heart.

As large-scale variety declined in the 1960s, cabaret in Ireland softened into safer, more respectable forms. But while mainstream versions softened, another strand was emerging, driven by a woman who refused to conform in any way.

Agnes Bernelle, a German-born singer and actress who settled in Ireland, brought a sharp European sensibility to Irish cabaret. Her work drew on the Weimar Republic tradition of Brecht and Weill: political, ironic and intellectually demanding. Bernelle performed in smaller venues, often to audiences unaccustomed to being challenged or confronted.

Bernelle’s presence matters because she kept cabaret’s edge alive in Ireland at a time when it risked disappearing altogether. She embodied a version of femininity that was cerebral and political, refusing the idea that female performers should be palatable or reassuring. Her influence would ripple forward through later generations of Irish cabaret artists, even when her name was not widely known.

By the 1990s, that influence surfaced most visibly in the work of Camille O’Sullivan. Emerging through the Dublin Fringe Festival and early performances in Bewley’s Café, O’Sullivan brought vulnerability, danger and emotional intensity back into the form. Her performances were intimate to the point of discomfort, often stripping songs back to their emotional core.

What O’Sullivan demonstrated was that cabaret did not need spectacle to be powerful. It needed connection. Her work bridged the gap between underground performance and international acclaim, leading to sold-out shows at venues including the Sydney Opera House and London’s Royal Festival Hall. Importantly, she did not dilute her style to achieve that success. She carried the intimacy of Irish cabaret onto global stages.

Alongside O’Sullivan, other Irish performers were expanding what cabaret could encompass. Katherine Lynch brought cabaret-inflected satire into the mainstream, using character comedy, musical pastiche and deliberate grotesquerie to dismantle ideas of femininity, taste and respectability. Her work, though often framed as comedy, shares cabaret’s DNA: exaggeration, direct address and an instinctive understanding of the audience-performer power dynamic.

In a different but equally confrontational register, Panti Bliss emerged as a defining cabaret figure of  21st century Ireland. Rooted in drag but structurally indebted to cabaret monologue and performance art, Panti fused humour, spectacle and political clarity, using the cabaret stage as a site of cultural intervention rather than escape.

This female lineage set the stage for another shift in the early 2000s, when burlesque began to re-emerge as a contemporary form. My own entry into that world came in 2003, after encountering burlesque cabaret in London. Within weeks, I produced my first show in Dublin, drawing inspiration from European cabaret traditions while grounding the work in live music, bringing the art of burlesque to Irish shores.

Burlesque in this context was not about striptease alone. It was about control of narrative and body, about women deciding how they were seen and on what terms. During the Celtic Tiger years, Irish audiences proved receptive to that unapologetic glamour. Cabaret once again became a social space where dressing up, performance and pleasure were encouraged.

It was during this period that Dita Von Teese first performed in Ireland, appearing at the high-profile opening of Harvey Nichols in Dundrum, later returning in 2020 for two sell-out shows at Dublin’s Olympia Theatre. Her appeal here was not accidental. Irish audiences already understood cabaret as something more than novelty. They recognised the discipline, theatrical intelligence and humour behind her performances.

Von Teese’s burlesque is often described as retro, but that might miss the point. Her work is meticulously constructed, referencing vintage aesthetics while asserting contemporary control. She weaponises glamour rather than parodying it. In that sense, she fits comfortably into the tradition established by women like Potter, Bernelle and O’Sullivan, each of whom used performance to claim space in different ways.

Her return to Dublin in February 2026 comes at a time when glamour might seem out of step with broader social uncertainty. Yet cabaret has always thrived in such moments. As Von Teese herself has noted, audiences seek fantasy not as escapism, but as empowerment. Cabaret does not deny reality, it refracts it, allowing performers and audiences alike to momentarily reframe their relationship to power, beauty and control.

What makes Ireland an especially receptive place for this is its long, if often under-acknowledged, tradition of female-led cabaret. From the mass popularity of Maureen Potter, through the intellectual rigour of Agnes Bernelle, to the raw emotional exposure of Camille O’Sullivan and the comedic timing of Katherine Lynch, women have consistently defined what cabaret looks like here.

Dita Von Teese’s return is a continuation of that story. Her performance lands in Ireland as part of a conversation Irish women in cabaret have been having for decades, about who gets to perform, how, and on whose terms.

Dita Von Teese returns to Dublin with Nocturnelle at the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre on Sunday, February 8, 2026.

Sara Colohan