A couple of times during the performance of Elf Lyons’ hour-long ballet Swan, I looked down to take notes and found that when I looked back up, Lyons, in her leggy parrot costume (by leggy, I mean her ‘knickers’ - as she referred to them - were gloriously visible throughout the show) was staring me straight in the face with her eager, disdainful look. This was theatre at its most intimate, its most funny and its most honest.

This interpretation of Swan Lake has taken inspiration from Tchaikovsky’s (frankly outdated) masterpiece, but brings it right up to the modern age. It begins with a prologue from Lyons, in which she introduces the show and provides examples of some of the balletic steps which we will see, including the angry pointy finger and the bendy ruler. It has all the familiar characters, but in new and updated forms: Odette, the swan princess, is played by an unsuspecting woman in the audience and later Lyons in a beautiful costume of white plastic bags, Prince Siegfried is shared between a different member of the audience and a plastic hand puppet of a crocodile, Siegfried’s mother is played by a rolly suitcase, and Von Rothbart the evil owl is played by Lyons herself, with binbags on her arms. Rothbart’s evilness is evident in the sneering remarks he throws out to members of the audience, like “you look like you’d do badly in a pub quiz” or the one I got: “you’re sitting by yourself, you loser”.

The whole show is performed in Lyons’ near-perfect French, although at one point she does ask a French-speaking member of the audience to translate a particularly complicated sentence for the benefit of the others: “je ‘ave a garleek clove in mah vagahna”. The audience member refuses - who knows why.

Lyons’ spontaneous humour is infectious; it’s impossible not to giggle. In fact, I found myself laughing out loud in a way that was reminiscient of those afternoons in Year 7 where for you and your friends, everything is inexplicably hilarious in the back of the sweaty science room. The humour is uncomplicated and generous, perhaps somewhat childish (in the best way possible), with the occasional nugget of biting social or political commentary thrown in as a sarcastic aside. She says it herself: if nothing else “we can all agreh, ah would mek a great imaginaree frend”. I wish my imaginary friends were as funny as Elf Lyons.