Elf Lyons loves economics. Or rather, as she warbles to The Lion King’s They Live in You, “eco-eco-no-nomics”. In her show ChiffChaff, which is equal parts John Maynard Keynes and Lorelei Lee, Lyons breathily considers fiscal policy by asking the audience to blow up sex dolls, play plinky-plonk instruments and imagine inflation as spinach. “I’m what the Times called ‘an ordeal’,” she informs us during a vigorous bout of hula-hooping. That review was for her 2017 rendition of Swan Lake, delivered in Franglais while dressed as a parrot. It earned her an Edinburgh comedy award nomination but left some looking for le exit.
When we meet for coffee in Soho, Lyons says she wants audiences to share her passion and think of finance as fun rather than “George Osborne holding a briefcase”. Unusually, it was the economy – rather than comedy – that really excited her as a child. “I don’t have a good comedy knowledge,” she says. “I’ve never seen Blackadder. Never watched Fawlty Towers or The Young Ones.” Growing up, she travelled a lot with her father, City economist Gerard Lyons. In China, he would explain the financial booms that built the skyscrapers. They watched films like Blade Runner and The Man in the White Suit together then discussed how they depicted expansion and the free market. “It’s about loving something,” she says of the irresistibly silly ChiffChaff. “Economics is beautiful.”
When Lyons did her master’s in theatre, after a drama degree in Bristol, her thesis explored the economics of the fringe. Now 27, she has realised the hard way that comedy is an uncommon market. After a month of sold-out shows in Edinburgh, she lost money on ChiffChaff last summer. More than £1,000 went on renting a room in a flat with no hot water. (“A room that had mice!”) Lyons is on the LGBT+ committee for Equity, the actors’ union, and says the highest number of complaints about not being paid, and being treated badly, come from cabaret, circus and comedy performers. “We tend to be in the lowest-paid bracket. We don’t have proper long-term contracts.”
It’s a gig economy: there’s no shortage of opportunities for standups, but the offer is often little more than a platform. You get a mic and a spotlight, maybe some food and drink, not a proper fee. “People need to learn to say no,” says Lyons. Recently she turned down a headline slot because accommodation wasn’t included. “If you want me on at the end, to headline, I’d love to,” she explains. “But that means the last train I can get is, like, the 11.40pm, which means I get into London at 1.30am. I don’t feel safe doing that. I don’t want to stay on someone’s couch, which is sometimes the offer: ‘You can stay at the promoter’s house.’” So she passed on the gig – “someone else who doesn’t have that worry will take it”. The accumulative impact of such predicaments on a comedian’s career – and their mental and financial health – is easy to imagine.
When Lyons wrapped ChiffChaff in Edinburgh, she had more than debt to deal with. During the run she experienced considerable pain in her legs and lost a lot of weight. She went straight to Southampton to perform a one-woman version of Medusa and, after it finished, was taken to hospital. She had lost the feeling in her legs and pelvis. In an online diary, she wrote: “It seems that the last year of doing shows that involve ice-skating, ballet, mime, hula-hooping and tap alongside teaching ping pong had a really big impact on my spine. Silly spine.”
There followed a period of limited mobility, chronic pain and depression. “I couldn’t do any gigs,” she tells me. “You don’t know what love is until someone has to wipe your bum for you.” She continues: “You know the word emasculated? I felt ‘efeminated’. I felt I’d lost all my female power and sexuality.” Her recovery was helped by Clara Cupcakes and Ian McCulloch. These are the two guinea pigs she acquired and named after an Australian circus performer and the lead singer of Echo & the Bunnymen respectively. Lyons reckons she got them because of a subconscious desire to have responsibilities while being cared for by others. They inspired her show Love Songs to Guinea Pigs, at Vault festival in London last month.
Lyons is now looking forward to dusting down ChiffChaff for a run in London. First she needs to buy a dress, because the one she wore in Edinburgh was swiped backstage. This time she’s got a Marilyn Monroe wig, too. In fiscal terms, the slump is over and it’s boom time. In any case, Lyons is happy. “I find it really hard not to be,” she laughs, simply because “I don’t have to go to school any more! I can go to bed whenever I want and have whatever I want for breakfast. Is that not the absolute epitome of happiness?” She remembers when her dad asked her how she was getting on. “I think he was expecting me to do some sort of a philosophical analysis of my career and where I was as a woman. I was like, ‘Daddy, I don’t have to do spelling tests!’”
Her father, who served as chief economic advisor to Boris Johnson when he was the mayor of London, is one of the most prominent UK economists to champion Brexit. “He comes across his fair share of criticism, like I do in comedy,” Lyons says. “We bonded over that.” Her mother, Annette, is a painter and Lyons has two siblings. By the age of 10, Elf (born Emily-Anne) was performing her plays to the family. “Everyone would laugh but they weren’t meant to be funny. They were really serious plays about big issues!” At boarding school, her style icon was Jane Eyre. She was “that weird girl who looks like a tree and is obsessed with Fiddler on the Roof”. Shakespeare was another obsession and Lyons is keen to return to the plays. “I want to play a really nice Iago. A really lovely [she pauses] fucking dick!”
After leaving school, Lyons collaborated with performance group Duckie, developing a bouffon act called The Matron, a homophobic boarding school mistress. Her most influential tutor was formidable clown guru Philippe Gaulier at his theatre school in Étampes, outside Paris. It was a safe space, she says, to push boundaries. One girl in her group made an autobiographical show about female genital mutilation; several created works about their experience of rape.
“You got a task on a Monday and made the show on Friday. You did the piece. It didn’t work or it did work. You throw it away and start again.” In one exercise, Gaulier told them to parody each other. “You really go for it. You want to show him you can do it. I got crucified,” she laughs. The time was “just hedonistic and pure. On Fridays we’d all go to the bar. Everybody would swap partners and drink bottles of crap wine.”
By this time, Lyons had discovered polyamory – not swinging, but a philosophy, she wrote in an Observer article, based on the “understanding that it’s possible to fall in love, and have relationships, with more than one person at the same time”. She credits polyamory with helping her overcome shame about her sexuality and with increasing her empowerment.
Earlier this year, Lyons gave a performance about the lives and loves of Lee Miller and Pablo Picasso for the Barbican’s Modern Couples exhibition. She and comedian Helen Duff are planning a show about surrealist Leonora Carrington. And Lyons is keen to pursue a project inspired by a passion second only to the economy: horror.
“I’m a big Stephen King fan,” she says. “I’ve got a tattoo on my arm …” What, of the bespectacled mega-selling novelist? Thankfully, no. “It’s a haiku from It.” Horror and comedy are so similar, she says: “the pullback and the reveal, the jump, the breaking of tension”. She starts to knock around ideas for an immersive show in a Shining-style hotel. “Maybe you tell the audience it’s a comedy show – and it’s not. Or put Jacques Tati in, like, Hostel! That would be …” She lifts up her fingers and, in a sublime little mime, delicately kisses them like the world’s proudest chef.
Elf Lyons: ChiffChaff is at Omnibus theatre, London, 25-30 March.
