Whether you’ve seen all of her previous shows or simply walked past a poster or two, you will quickly gather that Elf Lyons is an animal person. From her 2024 show Horses toThe Bird Trilogy that she resurrected at the Edinburgh Fringe (and later in London’s Soho Theatre), this performer seems to be repeatedly inspired by creatures great and small.
“I’ve got a deck of oracle cards and they are all animal related,” she admits when we chat mid Soho run, a run in which she is performing Raven, Chiffchaff and Swan on rotation for over a week. “I pick one before every show to help me. They give me a little focus point. Last night’s one was the cat for independence, like, you don’t need to rely on anyone else to know your adaptability and your ability to create great things. The only person who can get you from off stage to on stage and to open your mouth is you.”
Lyons has been writing and performing her own shows for over a decade, blending bouffon clowning (she studied until Philippe Gaulier, one of two pre-eminent figures in clowning – the other being Jacques Lecoq) and physical comedy with sharply written scripts and theatre art. Swan, the show she is bringing to Adelaide this year, combines all of these elements in a one hour whistle stop mockery tour of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. It’s not a new show (she originally performed it in Edinburgh back in 2017) but revisiting the piece nine years on has brought up interesting reflections and revelations.
“I’m gonna be honest, [2025] could not have been a more emotionally exhausting year. I didn’t have the capacity to make a brand new show. We knew people really reacted so positively to these three shows and Swan in particular was quite a big show in terms of people going ‘oh, clowning is this big thing.’ Gaulier had always been known, but I think a lot more people started talking about that in response to that and a few other clown shows that were going on that year.”
It’s true, over the past few years the clown genre, particularly of the Lecoq and Gaulier variety, has been masterfully employed in award-winning shows by artists like Julia Masli, Natalie Palamides and Garry Starr (to name a few). But in comparison to those shows, Lyons’ Swan has a more scathing undercurrent, something Lyons believes will be ‘naturally more acidic’ in 2026 than the first time around.
“Bringing Swan back now as a 34 year old; my body is different, my knowledge of the world is different, the way people look at me. I made the show when I was 26 and there’s a naivety and an innocence to watching a young woman being super silly,” she reflects. “It got reviewed as being ‘silliness for silliness’ sake: three stars,’ while boy clowns would get ‘silliness for silliness’ sake: five stars.’ I think silliness is still such a political issue for women all around the world, and this idea that we’re wasting our voice. We’re not given the same freedom that boys have to just be silly.”
On a less personal note, this sour taste seeps into the story of Swan Lake itself: “I just think Prince Siegfried is so subpar and Odette is so incredible. When it comes to what’s involved for men versus women, the dance of Odette and Odile, for example, is so difficult, and it’s played by the same woman.
“I think now we’re living in a time where women are actively choosing to be single, going ‘men aren’t good enough,’ so I think there’s going to be a new lens to it.”
Elf Lyons: Swan, The Hetzel Room at The Courtyard of Curiosities at the State Library, 20 Feb-22 Mar, 7.30pm