Review: Elouise Eftos at The Factory

Review by Alison Stoddart

In the buzzing Factory precinct in Marrickville, an eclectic mix of audience members file in and take their seats. Projected on a big screen behind the stage, a sexy, sultry comedian frolicking on the beach lets us know that yes, she is as hot as the premise of her show indicates.

It was with interest that I noted a surprising mix of generations waiting to see Elouise Eftos, ‘Australia’s First Attractive Comedian’ perform, a crowd that was so unusual it couldn’t be categorised. There was no gender bias evident, nor sexual identity, nor age. 

Elouise performs a hybrid of theatre and stand-up comedy, and she certainly has no trouble drawing every eye in the room to her.

She is a WAAPA trained actor, and it shows.  It is when she steps out of the ‘stand up’ role and into acting that she shines as a performer. As part of her act, she invites audience participation to play a game, a dodgy tactic that could backfire but, in this instance, comes of brilliantly when she encounters some very willing (and very funny) audience members who wholeheartedly enter in the spirit of the game. Their job is to pick a character displayed on the screen and then interact with that character (as performed by Elouise). It is worth mentioning that her ’coyote ugly’ bartender character is brilliant, and she absolutely nails it.

Taking the route of owning her beauty and attacking the ‘female collective’ for its backlash against that is part of her act. And having a point to make is also part of her shtick.  She could then benefit from leaning into that more. Any type of writing need’s structure and the setup and execution of a joke, or a pertinent point, is still important.   By working on her narrative arc and tweaking the writing, she can then land her point to its most effective. 

And speaking of landing a point, her central premise of owning her beauty and discarding self-deprecation seems to me to be beyond its used by date.  The younger generation have moved on so much from paying any attention to physicality that its constraints has lost its potency. 

But there is certainly no self-deprecation here and one of her funnier (and very clever) act is to change to the collective audience POV by launching into the ‘slow motion’ gyrations of a wet dream, thereby poking fun at the ogling patriarchy.

She does, though, effectively stick to her script when foraying into sexual harassment/abuse territory with her rendition of The Girl from Ipanema. Again, its her acting skills that stand out here. She convincingly portrays what it is like to walk down the street in her body and end up quite scared from the resultant attention. And her imitation of wog boys was spot on, ‘misogyny is so much better in Italian!’.

She finishes her show with a slightly bizarre Austin Powers inspired fembot performance.  Undeniably, she does have a hot body and using it is fair game in the world of comedy.

Elouise Eftos leaves audiences happy and the enthusiastic applause at the show’s conclusion was well deserved.

Image Supplied