Tiger Lillies’ Christmas Carol: A Victorian Gutter
Purcell Room, Southbank Centre
 

ONE of the most difficult things about lockdown was, of course, being deprived of the Tiger Lillies’ annual dose of macabre live grotesquery. If you have not had the depraved pleasure of seeing them before, think less gig and more interwar Berlin cabaret show.

Heavily influenced by Brechtian theatrics and central European street music, their shows typically involve the musical unfolding of a deliciously dark tale, generally revolving around the tortuous descent of some poor sod or other.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XetnP7EEzWY

So Dickens’s classic tale of redemption was in some ways an unusual choice for this year’s outing, its uptight Victorian moralising somewhat at odds with songwriter Martin Jacques’s usual celebrations of the shunned and the wicked, whose narrative voice is much more at home revelling in sin and its consequences than attempting to alter their course.