Bebe Cave: Swoon comedy review – Muses fight back
A bizarre, breathless comedy skewers the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the enduring tendency to dismiss intelligent women as mad
In this hat-based comedy, Bebe Cave satirises the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, reimagined here as three would-be-hipster beanie wearers at a slam poetry night in Victorian London. It’s a story told through the eyes of their muses and those who wish they were: the beautifully feeble Elizabeth Siddal (inspiration for John Everett Millais’ ‘Ophelia’), Effy from teen TV drama Skins, and her fictional sister Bertrude, the poster child for Cadbury and cocaine toothache drops until puberty killed her modelling career.
Lizzie is sick, she tells us in an inexplicably scouse accent, of being held in purgatory by every Pinterest save, tote bag print and pop-cultural reimagining of Ophelia. She sees through the Brotherhood’s pretensions, finding them as hollow as an Instagram poet, and tries to convince Bertrude that there’s more to life than the attentions of a man with a paintbrush. As if to exemplify life’s multitudes, Cave’s references range from the predictable (Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights) to the niche (George Sampson, the 14-year-old breakdancing winner of Britain’s Got Talent in 2008). The mixture is bizarre, yet astutely observed and breathlessly funny.
‘You wouldn’t want to get into an argument with her,’ one man say to his son after the show. It is an ironic, if oblivious, testament to the nuance, energy and relevance of Cave’s comedy. Now, as then, it is apparently easier to deem an intelligent woman mad than accept she has observed the world far clearer than most artsy men ever do.
Bebe Cave: Swoon, Pleasance Dome, until 30 August, 5.40pm.