Neither one nor two, the Hilton sisters seen by Christian Hecq and Valérie Lesort

The photos found on the internet show them as two lovely little girls who, in appearance, look indistinguishable from the children of their time – the 1910s in England – with their satin bows in their hair and their lace dresses. Except that… From photo to photo, Daisy and Violet Hilton are always together, stuck to each other, in the same position. And for good reason: linked to each other, they were, irremediably, since they were born Siamese twins, joined at the bottom of their spines.

Their extraordinary story could only attract the duo of actors-writers-directors formed by Christian Hecq and Valérie Lesort, with their taste for the monster and the strange, beings on the margins, rejected by society. The destiny of the Hilton sisters is therefore at the heart of their new show, created at the Théâtre des Célestins in Lyon before going on tour throughout France. And as this destiny is also emblematic of the society of the spectacle that developed at the beginning of the 20th century^e century, with the rise of the circus, cabaret, musical comedy and cinema, it is also the occasion for the ineffable duo to play with forms as they like them, cheerfully transgressing the boundaries of good and bad taste: a monster theater.

Exhibited from the age of three

Daisy and Violet were freaks from the start, since they were exhibited from the age of three, for commercial purposes, by their adoptive mother, Mary Hilton. And from then on they never left the parallel universe of the show, Moloch who attracted them and then sacrificed them, in this America that they joined from the mid-1910s. They knew how to sing and dance, they were pretty, and they had a huge success first in traveling circuses, then on the Broadway stages, before Tod Browning cast them in his famous film Freaks (The Monstrous Parade), in 1932.

The story is obviously a godsend for Valérie Lesort and Christian Hecq, who install it, from scene to scene, in a circus and cabaret universe where the characters seem to be cut directly from the red velvet curtains that envelop the stage. The tone is set from the outset by the two ringmasters who open the performance, twin brothers who establish the theme of the double that will run throughout the show.

And as always with them, there is no shortage of ideas and surprises abound. Shadow theatre, animated objects, musical comedy, striptease, magic, codes of silent cinema and horror films… Christian Hecq and Valérie Lesort reinvest a whole folklore of the circus and fairground show, especially since they have been joined by another great unclassifiable of contemporary stage creation, the magician and clown Yann Frisch. Everything mixes together, in games of illusion as seductive as they are disturbing, an illusion that seems the very state of existence of characters that reality has rejected from its sphere: man-trunk, fairground Hercules, true-false (?) knife-throwing act as hilarious as it is disturbing, appearance of the famous magician Houdini, who teaches the Hilton sisters to “to mentally dissociate”. Christian Hecq even rehabilitates a forgotten discipline which was all the rage, yes, in those not so ancient times: farting.

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