Strip The Life Fantastic

A one woman revolution - the audience are her co-conspirators

Strip the Life Fantastic is an intimate, immersive cabaret where the stage becomes a diary and the audience co-conspirators.

Alone with a chaise lounge, an elegant lamp, and a dressing screen, Australia’s Queen of Burlesque invites you into 36 years of striptease, rebellion, and glittering mischief. From Darlinghurst dives to royal palaces, from the seediest joints of Oxford Street to global stages, Imogen Kelly’s life has been anything but ordinary.

Seated cabaret-style, audiences are drawn into a world of memory and myth. Imogen slips between tables, sometimes pausing to share a secret, sometimes vanishing into darkness before re-emerging with an outrageous tale — seducing a troupe of acrobats, falling for an underworld figure, or rattling across Russia on the Trans-Mongolian Express.

Her stories span decades and continents: Tokyo nude weddings, London’s club-kid mayhem, discovering she was intersex and transitioning, motherhood on tour as the World Queen of Burlesque, and facing breast cancer at the height of her fame. She has worked as an AIDS officer, helped reshape Australia’s sex industry laws, and carried the torch of Sydney’s queer revolution.

No two performances are alike. Through playful games, the audience decides which tales are told, unlocking photos, films, songs, and perhaps even a striptease or two.

Part game show, part saucy time machine, Strip the Life Fantastic is not just storytelling — it’s a living archive of subversive spectacle, a glitter-drenched memoir told with humour, heart, and irresistible theatricality.