Drawing on the themes of Edinburgh Comedy Award nominated comedian Elf Lyons’ new show ‘Horses’, a show about play, the power of pretending, and why silliness is a feminist political issue (particularly relevant ahead of the election), told through clown and mime by an award-winning physical performer embodying a horse.
In her new show Elf brings attention to the tragedy of becoming an adult and losing our ability to play. How can we regain it—is that even possible? And it is this subject I would love for you to consider as a topic for a feature.
The show will be performed at the Edinburgh Fringe at the Pleasance Courtyard this year after winning Best Comedy & Pick of the Fringe at the 2024 Adelaide Fringe, making audiences cry (really!) in between bouts of laughter.
This show is about play and the power of pretending, looking at our relationship to children and to animals in particular. A deeply emotional hour celebrating the child within, it is performed entirely by a horse named Treacle, as portrayed by Elf. Using audience interaction and connection to bring people into her playful world,
Recent studies have shown how play is vital for adults to keep our brains flexible and open, ensure spontaneity and interconnection, and can sometimes go as far as to alleviate depression. Yet many don’t make the time, for fear of judgment or sheer lack of ability—the average adult now logs more hours at work than a 14th-century peasant according to Newsweek.
It’s this message that I am very much hoping would make a compelling hook for your audience, especially for women performers in comedy and theatre, who are still deemed frivolous, shocking and excessive for performing in a not-completely-serious way—as Elf can speak to from personal experience.
And this issue, seemingly limited to entertainment, is in fact reflected in wider society. Being constantly judged for daring to be silly or unserious makes women even less willing to play as an adult.
In Elf’s view, playfulness and silliness is a genuine feminist issue. Without access to play, women unfairly lose a vital method of meaningfully processing the trauma of living in today’s society. In Horses, Elf breaks down this boundary through clown and mime.
As so much of our culture is focused on nostalgia for a childhood that feels far away and remote, with endless cycles of reboots based on toys and films from our childhood like Barbie and superheroes dominating the box office and pop culture, and commercial games and escape rooms aiming to dominate leisure time, true individual and creative play and connection to childhood is rarer and rarer.
Elf has made a captivating and heartfelt work that lends itself perfectly to showing how reconnecting with individual playfulness and our own nostalgic childhood selves, in this case through animals, can be the key to healing and surviving—and even staging political resistance against the many societal forces which have seen the decline and denigration of imagination.
Elf Lyons is an award-winning comedian, theatre maker, director, comedy writer and voice artist. Since 2019 Elf’s TV and radio credits have included Comedians Giving Lectures (Dave), Comedians Against Living Miserably (Dave), The A to Z of Horror Movies (Sky Original) Unexpected Fluids (Radio 1), Evil Genius(BBC Sounds), and BBC World Service’s Stand Up Show – London (BBC World Service). She wrote and starred in her own BBC Three short Top Ten Things I Have Brought Whilst Drunk. She has been a series regular on The Stand Up Sketch Show (ITV2 – series 2 & 3), The Breakfast Show and Culture Hour (Times Radio), The Colin Murray Show (BBC Radio 5) and The Dog Ate My Homework (CBBC).
