Elf Lyons is bringing The Bird Trilogy and Horses to Soho Theatre from Friday 12th Dec and Wednesday 7th January. Tickets available HERE and HERE.
The Bird Trilogy takes audiences from ballet to economics to horror — what connects these wildly different worlds within your surreal comic universe?
Same way that you have a myriad of different interests, emotions and ideas that all collate to make you. We are all diamonds and depending on how the light hits us, we refract differently. It’s sort of the same with these. Each one is quintessentially me, but they are all me at different times of the day and in different states of play. Swan is pure silliness, ChiffChaff is much more thoughtful and melancholic and Raven is much more cathartic and rageful.
Your work often dances between comedy, theatre, and clowning — how do you balance the joy of chaos with the discipline that makes it all land so precisely?
That is the art to be a professional i think? You have to be disciplined so the audience can trust you to take them to those silly places and to those more obscure scenic routes creatively. If they have any inkling that you are just ‘feeling it out’ and just ‘chasing the vibe’, like snails, the audience retract into their shells and it is much harder to get them back out to go on the journey with you. I hate hate hate hate hate it when I meet someone who just says “I’m just gonna see what happens”. NO. have a sodding plan. Land the plane.
Horses has been described as the first-ever comedy show performed entirely by a horse – where did that idea spring from, and what does it reveal about play and imagination in adulthood?
The idea made my sister laugh, it made me laugh, it made my agent put her head in her hands and laugh like an exhausted mother and go “oh Elf….” and thus I thought “well, I have to do this now”.
Across your career, you’ve reimagined everything from classical art forms to financial systems — what keeps you returning to the challenge of making the cerebral feel ridiculous and human?
It may seem odd, but it doesn’t feel like a challenge. When I make shows, I am genuinely just trying to make the most logical choices to make the show as good and as fun and as exciting as it can be and making creative choices that I think are interesting and honest. When I made Swan, I didn’t think it was a clown show. I genuinely thought (and do still think) that it is an incredibly accurate, concise and clear explanation of the story of Swan Lake – and because of that, and my belief, it makes it clown, because apparently the ideas I have are, in the words of my friend Garry Starr, “Totally idiot”.
Your comedy often celebrates the absurd while tackling serious ideas — how do you decide which truths to smuggle inside the silliness?
They are never smuggled. I think we learn more about people through what they love, and we connect with them more through their specialist interests – and that sharing of joy is a beautiful state to collectively be in as a performer and audience, and means you can build trust to take them to more dynamic emotional places. All my shows start with a ‘absurd’ concept or subject I find interesting, and then I extrapolate and go from there… Choosing to reveal information about yourself must always be in the benefit of the audience, helping them with THEIR life, and if I don’t feel like divulging information about me helps that, then I don’t do it. Same with serious ideas.
With The Bird Trilogy and Horses arriving back-to-back at Soho Theatre, what do these shows say about where you are now as a performer, artist, and fearless mischief-maker?
Unrelentingly exhausted, exhilarated, lucky, thankful and caffeinated.