The Tiger Lillies at Trafo - Budapest

First impact, the audience. Kind of scary. I definitely had different expectations when I entered the big Trafo studio. The chairs were put in nice rows and old women with their husbands were waiting for the musical performance. No freaks, no Goths, no clowns, nothing that I expected. The Budapest crowd was formed of old ladies, corporate middle-agers and a bunch of nice Western lost tourists. This should be interesting, I said to myself, knowing the songs and Tiger Lillies reputation. And indeed it was. But straight to the show: cabaret to the bone, cheap clown makeup, slap-stick comedy show outfits, typical gags with poor acting, falsetto voice a la castrato opera, playing with toy music instruments and so on. All the Tiger Lillies arsenal that I could dream of. And everything functioned brilliantly. I had a 10 times stronger feeling than watching a John Waters movie: everything is so bad and theatrical that strikes you and makes you stay there into the illusion, in their sad and hysterical world, with their pimps and whores and freaks and killers and circus kids. By keeping an eye on the beautiful theatricality you are not getting out of the illusion but in a Brechtian way, you follow what’s beneath, you get straight into its reality. That you know it’s illusionary. This was my first musical experience of this type: through music, I even got into their characters’ stories, their little gags and their melancholic parts. The public was incredibly receptive: they laughed and cried and applauded. They knew their songs and asked for more. But one thing I still missed: a good old cabaret atmosphere, loud and smoky, drinking alcohol and joking during the show. Coming from the other side of the performance, we, the audience, were not doing the right thing, we were out of the picture. And that was most impressive in their show: a certain type of performance asks for a certain type of spectators that they should slowly become, and that has power and trangressive force. What I thought I would never like in a show I liked it here: their great mannerism, the fact that they played the same songs and gags that they played over and over again for thousand times and you could see that. Their apparent boredom only made them more intense and the atmosphere more potent. All the time during the show I had one friend in mind: Olli (this is his website, just in case), an old clown from Switzerland who told me one amazing thing: a good clown doesn’t have to bring anything new, you need only one good gag that you can do it all your life, till it becomes perfect, a clown is not an actor, we function different. Tiger Lillies are not clowns for sure but they function in a similar way to Olli.