Bertolt Brecht and Samuel Beckett are arguably the two most important theatrical innovators of the 20th century but their world views couldn’t be more different, with the German Marxist bristling with anger and the cry for change and the monkish Irishman soaked with pessimism and despair.

Appropriately, considering the current mood of mash-up of outrage, absurdity and existential despair, not one but two shows at this year’s Perth Festival were fuelled by this timely fusion of Brecht and Beckett.

First we had Meow Meow’s The Red Shoes at His Majesty’s, in which the WAAPA-trained cabaret star recasts Hans Christian Anderson’s tale of a girl who can’t stop dancing as a critique of capitalist excess, with the pile of junk at the heart of the set borrow from Beckett’s Happy Days.

Then up the road at The Embassy the British Brechtian punk cabaret pioneers The Tiger Lillies delivered one miserable, macabre song after another, a series bleakly comic numbers about murder, despair, suicide, alcoholism, homelessness, drug abuse, and sexual exploitation that had the audience, in best Beckett tradition, laughing uproariously at the awfulness.

The pitch-black tone was set with The Way It Goes from their latest album, Serenades from the Sewer, about a boy whose mother is sex worker and father who kills his pain with booze. “They never hurt me,” admits the boy. “They were kind/Off their heads and out of their minds.”

Surprisingly, much of the set was made up from songs from Serenade in the Sewer, an indication that Tiger Lillies creator, composer and frontman Martyn Jacques has lost none of his creative drive and energy despite being around since 1989.

While Jacques and co. leaned into their favourites, such as Hell (“They’re going to tear you from limb to limb because of your so-called sin”) and the lovely melancholic Violin Plays (“The violin plays/Each time filled with dread/Soon you’ll be dead”, many of the high points came from the new album, which is unusual for any veteran band.

A high point was the giddy, surreal Stabbed In the Back by a Railroad Track, another song about the horrors of drug abuse that was punctuated with a pumping drum solo and a whistle that captured the difficulty of getting off the bad stuff once you are on it.

 Jacques has two very accomplished sidemen, bassist Adrian Stout and drummer Budi Butenop, but it really is a one-man show. The multi-talented singer-songwriter switches between piano and accordion and uses his famed falsetto as effectively in the thumping Threepenny Opera-inspired outrages to the more melodious, melancholic songs.

Jacques and his crew saved their best for last, with their gloriously cynical take on heroin chic, Heroin “If you want to win, take heroin/If you wanna be magic, go slash your wrists,” sang Jacques, whose voice became more powerful and impassioned the more horrible the lyric.

After so much gleeful misery and darkness Jacques, sent us into the night with the sombre but beautiful Birds Are Singing in Ukraine, in which the singer imagines the day when the “Moscow monster” is defeated and lovers can one day walk hand in hand in fields, albeit ones fertilised with corpses underneath.

“All that’s left are bones and teeth,” sang Jacques, a line that could sit nicely in Waiting for Godot and the perfect sign-off for a trio who never go out of fashion because their subject is always with us.