The eye-popping final sequence of Elf Lyons’s Raven unfolds to Rage Against the Machine’s cacophonous Killing in the Name: “Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me.” As an anthem for this particular show, it could not be bettered. For all that Lyons styles this comedy-horror crossover as a Stephen King homage, Raven does things its own way and no one else’s. Sure, it plays with fright-night tropes – but Lyons is up to something more complex than mere horror pastiche. This is a show about monsters: the ones that lurk in children’s imaginations, those that populate the real world – and the monstrous self that Lyons chooses to inhabit on stage.
The 31-year-old was taught by the clown guru Philippe Gaulier, who told her she was most watchable on stage when being horrible. That’s not an easy lesson to learn, particularly for a woman; certainly Lyons’s earlier work (such as the Edinburgh Comedy award-nominated Swan) was anything but. In Raven, she recounts in five “books” her lifelong relationship with the grotesque – as a child of an unconventional family, exposed to gory movies at a tender age; as a lonely dormer in a spooky boarding school, tiptoeing dimly lit corridors by night. We meet grownup Elf, too, in whom abusive men and annoying women trigger violent fantasies (and not just fantasies …) disproportionate, you might think, to the offence caused.
A dramaturgical purist might look at Raven and request one more draft, the better to make this unruly show hang together. But perversity is part of the point of an hour that raises Lyons’s personal demons so she can publicly refuse to play by their rules. And the show’s eccentricities, the bits that stick out at the oddest angles, are often its funniest moments. See Lyons (fishnets, leotard, clown makeup) representing her nine-year-old self in inappropriately sexy interpretive dance. Or, in the show’s comic peak, role-playing a lovable fly meeting its spider nemesis.
If Lyons is the fly in that scenario, she bites fiercely back at the spider here, in a show suggesting that, if lovable takes you so far, terrifying takes you further.
Elf Lyons: Raven is at Soho theatre until 5 November
