Nobody warns you about the swans, or quite how long it takes to meet them.
“These four women have issues. Being queer isn’t one of them” – and the play is at its best when it remembers that.
F**king Swans follows Ronnie and Harper, together nearly two decades, through the collapse of their marriage following a military deployment and a surprise pregnancy amongst other major life events. Lindsey and Carol orbit them as the comic relief duo: a kleptomaniac and her vain younger girlfriend, the chaos couple to Harper and Ronnie’s supposedly perfect one. The ensemble is, on balance, a capable one. Emma Wilkinson Wright and Kelly Lamor Wilson bring energy and timing to roles that exist primarily to lighten the load of the central drama. Siubhan Harrison carries Ronnie’s stoicism with a convincing restraint, and Mikkie-Dené Le Roux gives Harper a quiet exhaustion. When the two are finally in the same room without armour, the performances justify the wait.
What doesn’t work is the play’s curious reticence about its own emotions. This is a story about two women who cannot talk to each other, which would be dramatically rich if the play itself were not similarly tight-lipped with its audience. Key revelations arrive in the final scenes: that Ronnie had returned home multiple times before her dramatic Easter surprise, that Harper has been feeling like a single mother for years. These are not twists; they are the substance of the drama. The audience understands the implications including the loneliness, the resentment and the invisible labour, but understanding is not the same as being shown. The montage sequences gesture towards this, Harper’s daily routine swelling and repeating as her pregnancy progresses, but gesture is not enough. By withholding the emotional interior until the umbrella scene, the play mistakes evasion for structure, or at least it feels that way. A play is not a film, and montage and lighting states can only carry so much. By the time the title finally lands (“nobody warns you about the f*cking swans”) the audience is too close to the end to feel it properly.
F**king Swans is unapologetically American with its line-dancing bar, the military culture, the geography, the comedy, and this is not inherently a problem. However, the humour in particular has the cadence of a network sitcom rather than a stage play, reaching for warmth through broad strokes in a way that flatters the characters rather than complicating them. How much of this lands for a London audience is debatable. The laughs, when they came, felt polite.
Elise Marra’s script has a genuine subject at its centre, the heteronormative trap of a marriage that made sense at twenty and suffocates at forty, the asymmetry of sacrifice in partnerships where one person’s ambition requires the other’s labour, but it doesn’t quite trust that subject enough to let its characters speak it plainly. When they finally do, in the last few minutes, you wish they had been given the room to do so much sooner.
F**king Swans runs until Saturday 13th June at the Omnibus Theatre, London. Tickets here.
No play with an asterisk in the title can be sold to me, even with the most articulate, witty and insightful review