STEPHEN Dee's Variety Show in the atrium of the Temple Bar Gallery featured nine wall hanging vitrines, each a miniature freak show offering up former musical hall performers as though exhibits in a bizarre natural history museum.

Creatures such as the three legged man, the man with the xylophone skull, Laurel and Hardy in their declining years, Max Wall down but not out, the ageing Laurel and Hardy and somersaulting, 60 year old Buster Keaton are all represented in cartoonish porcelain or clay effigies.

Whatever the physical appearance of members of his macabre army, Dee's real interest seems to be in the anecdotal material surrounding each. Each glass fronted cabinet is accompanied by a longish text outlining the star's career, usually dwelling on their inevitable decline in popularity. The style of Dee's caricatures, which are more puppets than representational sculptures, often sits in striking contrast to these fascinating short but sad biographies with their often depressing final acts.

All of Dee's subjects enjoyed a period of fame and wealth, but eventually found themselves performing in increasingly downmarket locations to unappreciative audiences. None, however, suffered as harshly at the hands of critics as professional orator, Rev Harold Davidson, Rector of Stiffkey, who Dee represents performing in a zoo pen in Skegness, shortly before being savaged to death by a lion.