Gotharama the third of Moira Finucane and Jackie Smith's Cabarets Bizarre premiered in July 2005, in Melbourne at fortyfivedownstairs to extraordinary audience responses, a sell-out three week season and critical acclaim. The work, supported by The Australia Council, Arts Victoria, Sydney Opera House Trust and the City of Melbourne, is an intimate and extraordinary blood-red spectacle: welcoming audiences into a twisted little parlour - of Victorian tapestries, fortune telling games, lush red curtains around the monstrous bed of the slumbering Queen of Dreams, old-time tunes tinkling on the ivories - then plunging them into a wild, unexpected, twisted, torrid, hilarious and horrifying gothic world.

Created with the extraordinary design talents of set designer Anna Tregloan, costume designer David Anderson and lighting designer Paul Jackson, Gotharama is the boudoir of the Queen of Dreams, dominated by a massive gothic bed faced with antique cupboards - part open coffin, part boat, part bed. When the red velvet canopy of this bed is drawn back, thirteen gothic chapters are revealed; an extraordinary mix of monstrous and meticulous physical performance and gothic tales played out by Moira Finucane. At the bedside, dressed in a massively spiked Victorian bombazine, sits the Psychokinetic Pianist at her shiny black upright piano; accompanying monologues, speaking in tongues, singing with bloodcurdling sweetness 'god bless the little children' and hanging her handiwork by its neck.

From the corseted, bandaged woman that awakes to an industrial scream-fest in A Fair Maid Awakes; to the innocent girl following her evil beau out on a boating trip in An Outing; from the forbidden reading of a gothic romantic novel that literally makes the bed rain with excitement in Beware The Novel; to the understated emotional abyss that engulfs a bikini clad woman on A Sunny Day and causes her to freeze to death; Gotharama takes a "spectacularly stunning" ghost train ride across forms and influences, delivering the gothic feminine in perverse, unexpected and thrilling ways. The rock goddess emerging from the grave in Buried Alive!; the tale of Sisters, in which a dead sister waits in a freezing mansion for 'you' to arrive; natural forces that slowly dismember a woman gripped by Inertia; the death of aerialist parents 'the Handsome Divines' in the terrible tale of The Seven Terrors; the monstrous mother waiting for her children in What's for Dinner ('sweet but not too sweet, crisp but not too crisp'); and a girl's-own gothic bodice ripper in Argentina Gina Catalina's adventure with the pirates on the high seas, culminates in Gotharama's grand aortic spectacle - Finucane's gothic white bride becoming a human blood fountain in The Bleeding Heart.

Working with composers Darrin Verhagen and Carolyn Connors, Gotharama revels in frission and tension between the parlour sounds of the upright piano and the screech of industrial hard core. Piano compositions from Carolyn weave through Finucane's monologues, varying from understated richness, to dramatic counterpoint, to melodramatic hysterics. Beethoven's Pathetique, a work once forbidden to young ladies, accompanies and drives the forbidden book reading. The Gothic soundscapes of Darrin Verhagen bring the sound of crows, howling winds, maniacal screams and circular saws into and across Finucane's gothic journeys.

Pecking the eyes out of performance and gothic influences including gothic architecture, the gothic romantic novel, Nosferatu, magic realism from Santa Sangre to Innocent Erindira, Japanese horror, silent movie, physical theatre, burlesque, vaudeville, melodrama, old style cabaret, performance and text based theatre, Gotharama coalesces these forces and forms in a completely unique performance work.