Clothes make the man. Jonny Woo, a striking and poised young man with clear green eyes and cropped blond hair sits across from me in Groucho’s, his olive-coloured designer jacket shimmering with good taste. Two giant carrier bags bulge with wigs and heels. He’s in rehearsal for his upcoming show, Faggot, in which he plays a host of characters using five costume changes and interactive digital screens.

A sophisticated and popular performance artist, Woo is at the top of his cross-dressing game. Like a superhero, he can magically transform himself into an exotic creature who mixes Rabelasian humour, social commentary, hilarious high jinks and an arch and prescient consciousness.

“My own personal experiment is with more avant-garde looks, monologues and micro-routines. I’ve opened up the traditions of drag to a broader scene — burlesque, performance art, music, cabaret, design, comic improv,” he says.

Woo is the premiere tran-about-town on the London club scene. A transvestite is a gender illusionist, a gender-hacker. If you don’t know the celebrity culture scene, join the club. But I’ve heard of Jonny Woo.

I can’t get out of my head his hypnotically rhythmic new single, Faggot, now climbing the charts. Will it get me arrested if I sing aloud at top speed as Woo does: “Who ya think ya lookin’ at, faggot, faggot? Pretty Bristol boy . . .” His tongue-twisting patter set to music by Jenny Fairfax is, he says, “an imagined confrontation between an insulting drunken young man and the transvestite of his dreams — I play both vocal parts. A love story tinged with contempt and violence.”

Some of the characters for his four-night run at Soho Theatre? “Triple-kick Longjump Sally, a would-be Olympic contender; Mr Snorts, the lift operator at the London Bridge (the lift only goes one way — down). He’s a dandy in britches with frog feet. Spam Ayres is a lingual experiment. I take the encrypted spam of computer language and convert the gibberish code into monologue. Spoken with enough conviction, it sounds meaningful, in a Chaucerian way. ‘Quit MacFadden with my arm, B. Vendor-pool’, for example.”

Woo’s costumes vary among bikinis, gorilla suits, black slips, Mickey Mouse gloves, disco hair, wigs of many colours, shiny-silver techno-dresses, extreme platform boots and comic codpieces. Tall and slim, he moves gracefully like the modern dancer he is.

The inside story: “I grew up in Dulwich across from the power station, so as a child I thought clouds came from chimneys. Contemporary dance was my talent and ambition. Instead I found myself selling perfumes and men’s clothing in London. I ran away to NYC for three years and trained there, like Madonna did, with hopes of arriving a dancer and becoming a club star. I lived in the East Village, at the hub of the alternative theatre world. Lavinia Co-op, the famous Cockney drag queen from the 1970s comedy troupe Bloolips, took me under her wing — literally: she was actually dressed as a moth when I first met her. Watching her, I worked out my own moves.

“The name of a tran’s alternate persona is bestowed on you by established theatrical drag acts. You don’t give it to yourself. Pandemonium Satanica, say, or Hedda Lettuce, are examples — they’re humorous. But I didn’t need one. I’ve always been Jonny Woo, short for surname Wooster, since high school.”

Six years ago Woo came back to London, where he has been non-stop, hosting talent shows in Shoreditch, conga lines and voguing events at the National Portrait Gallery, performing at Bestival and at BBC Radio 1’s Wonderland party in Ibiza, conducting Gay Bingo Nights (tonight’s theme is Dynasty vs Dallas trivia). He models for Omar Kashoura and opens designer boutiques such as Jeanette’s of London.

Dionysus was a Greek god who ruled parties and who was raised disguised in a dress in order to fool jealous deities. He would have liked Woo. But Woo has curtailed his celebratory impulses since a collapse last year sent him to hospital. “My friends saved my life bringing me there. My kidneys, liver and lungs began to fail. I was put into a coma so they could work on my systems. In it I had strange dreams. I dreamt I was in a TV series starring the American actress Angela Bassett. She owned a perfumery called Black Pearl; I was her assistant. Every time I’d regain consciousness and slip away again, I’d pick up where we’d left off in the last episode. It was a serial hallucination.”

He can play ingénues, but he prefers to work the edge where things are rawer, stranger and edgier, the place where slight discomfort is created, making a sociological statement beyond the decorative. Instead of presenting the perfect façade, he shows us both the allure of and cracks in the very concept of façade.

Woo and I have something in common. We’re both characters in a Judge Dredd comic. Judge Johnny Woo and Call-Me-Kenneth, the carpenter-droid. Coincidence? I think not.

Jonny Woo is in Faggot at the Soho Theatre, W1, Tues-Sat (020-7478 0100; SohoTheatre.com)

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