Breakups. We’ve all been through them. Sometimes they’re mutual, sometimes not. Sometimes agony, sometimes relief. And sometimes, they’re world-shattering bereavements that seem to end, or at least upend, everything. That’s the experience two comedy shows seek to express on this year’s fringe – an experience that can’t be captured by the usual conventions of the medium. Wry wisecracks into a microphone just won’t cut it. A whole new form is required.
Perhaps formal innovation isn’t such a shock when Elf Lyons is the innovator, as almost all of this dedicated nonconformist’s work has been entirely bespoke. But even for her, The Woman on the Edge is something different: shards of a disintegrating sense of self, grafted together to suggest the journey Lyons has been on since her relationship ended, shortly before her wedding day, early last year. The conceit is that the show is being performed by a Norma Desmond-alike alter ego. A brittle and wise-cracking refugee from vintage Hollywood, smoke plumes from her décolletage as she fills in for absent Elf while keeping at bay her husband, the clown Pagliacci, on the end of the phone.
But that conceit soon devolves to others: audio clips of Lyons, her friends and family talking about her breakup and subsequent breakdown; scenes from an ill-advised romantic tryst in Thailand; an “opera” spliced together from remarks made to Lyons by self-absorbed men. There’s a subplot about the Apollo 13 mission, a private passion of Lyons’, which emerges as a metaphor for her search for fulfilment in love. All might look lost, but mission control could yet bring the crew home alive.
It’s potent stuff, building to a fierce finale in which she claws back something defiant, celebratory even, from the wreckage of her love life. It’s often beautifully funny and idiosyncratic too, from an act whose work keeps getting richer. The surreal and aphoristic running jokes – the one about Pagliacci visiting the doctor; the one about the reflections her Hollywood alter ego sees in the mirror – are tart and emotionally charged. Her anecdote about a shared bath in Bangkok paints a vivid word-picture of underwhelming romance. A dumbshow at the end, that unites two of the show’s other strands (tango and snails), is captivatingly expressive of Lyons’ desolation.
Kate Dehnert’s show Echo, award-nominated at Melbourne’s comedy festival, comes from a strikingly similar place. Dehnert’s relationship with an unnamed fellow comedian was a decade old when he left her for another woman. Her sense of herself, and of the life she’d anticipated, collapses. She returns home to Australia to rebuild her life. And none of this can be done justice by straightforward storytelling. So Dehnert goes for “1/3 play, 1/3 standup, 1/3 rave”, as the blurb has it; the show often sounds like a primal scream with repetitive beats.
Lyons’ analogy of choice was Apollo 13; Dehnert’s is nuclear war, with her life reduced to a blasted post-apocalyptic landscape of confusion, depression and rage. She has to de-programme herself. She tries edging back towards coupledom – cue an unlovely dirty-talking skit with a man on a dating app. The show’s therapeutic journey towards “self-actualisation” is more conventional than Lyons’. Its several songs are sung tunelessly, which may be the point, but doesn’t make them great to listen to. But, as Dehnert navigates towards her own vindication at the end of the hour, there’s no denying Echo’s emotional punch, nor her achievement in finding an (insistent, suffocating) form to express the disorientation of a very bad breakup.
It’s quite the cognitive dissonance after those shows to then see Ele McKenzie’s debut, Bringing It All Back Home, which also addresses the fallout from a breakup. We look in vain here for nuclear war metaphors. Give or take a gag about how many Mini Milks it prompted her to eat, McKenzie takes the breakup in her stride, and focuses on the aftermath: a move back in to her parents’ house, and a reckoning with her arrested development as a 30-year-old trapped in her childhood home.
It’s an eye-catching introduction to the work of a comic who recently starred in the BBC sitcom Funboys. McKenzie exploits for all its worth the mismatch between her gleefully juvenile sexual candour and the flat voice and sexless demeanour (she calls herself “the feral fourth Haim sister”) that back it up. The imagined May-to-September romance with Bob Dylan into which the show evolves is both blissfully silly and covertly expressive of her eagerness to bond with a dad who treats her less as daughter, more as colleague.
Sometimes breakups feel as if they’ve ended everything – but as McKenzie’s show reminds us, when one door closes, others usually open. OK, so the life McKenzie encounters on the other side of this particular door (house-sharing with mum; intimate acts with a folk-rock icon) may not offer the likes of Dehnert and Lyons much consolation. But – like their own experiences, and in a radically different way – it makes for fine comedy.
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Elf Lyons is The Woman on the Edge is at Pleasance Courtyard until 31 August. Kate Dehnert: Echo and Ele McKenzie: Bringing It All Back Home are at Pleasance Courtyard until 30 August.
