Any audience member hoping to spend an hour in thrall to an exquisite ballet recital beware! Lauren Brady’s Swan? certainly pirouettes around the stage with aplomb, but she is equally likely to ignite an e-cigarette and throw up a furball. While this may not be for the purists, it certainly is an exceedingly enjoyable deranged hour of comedy and tragedy.

Taking the heartbreaking story of Swan Lake as a narrative framework, Lauren uses her feminine wiles to try and find a suitable hero to be her forever mate.  Combining her coquettish feminine wiles one minute, with a more direct approach—most notably when she spins around to present her bottom to the audience in an awkward bid to seduce a potential suitor – Lauren will do anything to leave behind the lake, where her only friends are cigarette butts.

 Audience participation is handled expertly. In the performance I saw, two men—one extremely confident, the other rather shy—were brought onstage. Lauren responded to both ‘suitors’ with comic agility, tailoring her performance to include them without overshadowing the narrative. Her constant requests for support from the female members of the audience ensured no one was left behind.

The beauty of the show is that, amid all the hilarity, we never lose sight of the Swan’s painful loneliness, and it is very much Lauren Brady’s skills as a performer that illuminate that fact. She deserves full houses every performance.

Reviewed by Rona