Horses

Elf Lyons new show Horses has been broken in across numerous festival seasons and yet the show leaves me feeling restless.

Elf’s sense of clowning falls short in this show and it boils down to a clowning cardinal sin: breath. She barrels through at a rapid pace and hardly comes up for air. It might seem too simple for me to name breathing as the root cause of clunky clowning but it is crucial. If the performer doesn’t breathe they do not create space for the audience to receive the work. Not breathing means the performer bypasses their own ‘feeling state’. In clowning we say ‘breathe more, feel more’. Audiences love clowning because they become privy to the intense emotional life of the clown or character - which is usually beyond ordinary and stupidly funny. It is clear that this sold out, warm audience is there to love Elf, but I wonder - does she feel it?

Elf does not seem affected by this audience in real time and space. In fact she seems hurt from past audiences, and projects that onto us. There is a tone of untransposed jadedness. At the very top of the show she has a dig at Melbourne audiences for not laughing how she wants them too, she has a dig at past reviews from The Guardian and The Age, then at the tail end of the show says ‘Fuck the reviews’. However this show comes with a long list of five stars, we are in a sold-out show at the Malthouse Theatre, so I feel a tension here.

Speaking from the perspective of a theatre practitioner who works in theatres and also in the streets of Melbourne I can attest that Melbourne audiences are traumatized. Melbournians need to come out of the house more than ever. The social fabric of Melbournians was devastated in our intense lockdowns. We need shows like Elf’s, where the invitation for wild, abandoned play is embodied in front of us. Bold physical comedians like Elf have the potential to heal us, to help us reclaim our playful spirit. But Elf doesn’t nail her brief. She chooses to ‘tell’ and ‘tell’ and ‘tell’ a lot more than she ‘shows’. The over reliance on words robs the potential naivety from her clowning.

Elf is a performer who wants to use her body and she seems to have a lot of fun placing lots of characters in the space. She is surely capable of great physical work. Yet in the show that I saw her physical work is ill-defined. She moves a lot but her embodied shapes are unclear, her character embodiments dissolve and blur into one another, the voices all sound the same, and her mime is shoddy. There is some technical work missing here which a director could finesse. She rushes through her mime work and it seems like she doesn’t actually see the imagined objects and spaces she creates. If she doesn’t see them, we can’t go with her. Again, she powers through everything and does not allow her own imagined space to affect her.

The artist has clearly been pulled towards the great archetypal figure of the horse to help tell her story. If the autobiographical parts of this show are true, the horse was very important to her as a little person. I can feel a lot for that young part of her/us. Young children often find animals to accompany themselves, to help them exist wildly in a world that incrementally oppresses their wildness. The horse is such a fierce, high status, deep animal, so in-charge, unwieldy, it can sense a weak hand and break free. The performer talks a bit about some mythological depth of the horse. But she doesn’t actually physically evoke its brute and beautiful dynamic. I don’t receive the horse in all the naive glory that her inner child must remember. Again, lots of talking, some funny quips, some dark humour but not enough childlike, glorious horsing.

It is possible the artist wants this show to be about that tragic moment in human development when play stops. When the wild horse is tamed. The performer must care a lot about humanity’s willingness to play. But she doesn’t take the writing beyond herself, there’s a great theatrical metaphor here that goes wanting. I want her to gallop in the free, uninhibited way that she did when she was a young horse person. I really want Elf to play and not work in this show. This is in no means a bad show, it is not at all a flop but it does not exploit the conventions of physical theatre/physical comedy that could make it hit full horsepower.

Review by Kimberley Twiner

https://www.comedyfestival.com.au/browse-shows/elf-lyons-horses/