Model, actor, journalist, comedian: no doubting Michelle De Swarte is a jack of all trades, but is she a master of this one? On the evidence of her funny and mouthy touring show, it’s a yes. The set may not tread novel ground for comedy – far from it – nor cohere around any particular theme. But The Afters is distinguished by a fantastically confident and cavalier standup voice, as the south Londoner fires off hot and heedless takes on the menopause, parenting and her unconventional upbringing.
You feel in safe hands from the get-go when De Swarte turns what you assume to be some off-the-peg, flatter-the-locals crowd work into a fine set piece about cultural appropriation and Norfolk seafarers. She follows up with a number about a “poor-off” contest she had with a citizen of Bradford, whose salty tang of truth adds up to something far funnier than the usual comedy of class cliches. Then comes our host’s menopause material, distinguished from comparable routines by the pose of stroppy denial De Swarte strikes that such a fate might ever befall her.
Pieties begone! De Swarte has no time for them in The Afters – but no interest in shoot-from-the-hip posturing either. Her say-what-she-sees manner seems wholly unaffected, as she arches eyebrows at this or that aspect of modernity – the app her niece has to track her periods; a man who claims that his girlfriend “makes him feel safe”. And if you need context for this resistance to touchy-feeliness, meet De Swarte’s forebears: poor, queer and ruthlessly unsentimental, they populate the show’s later stages to rough-hewn comic effect and render her personality wholly explicable.
One might wish for more from the show’s striking final section, in which De Swarte recalls the attitudes she grew up with to teenage girls dating older men and itemises her encounters with Jeffrey Epstein and P Diddy. Maybe there’s a whole show – or a book? – on that to come. Certainly, The Afters whets the appetite for more from this most cheerfully incautious of comic voices.
