The world is a dumpster trash fire, and who would be better to skewer all of its woes than a creature that loves rubbish – the fly! SWARM is a darkly satirical look at the rotten underbelly of Modern Britain, propped up by Tory lies, capitalist greed, and white supremacy. Written, directed, and performed by the anarchist clown Liv Ello, fresh off their successful Edinburgh run, SWARM arrives at Vault Festival to flip on its head David Cameron’s heartless use of the term to describe migrants. It’s us who are the swarm.
Part nature documentary, part cultural expose, part clown show – SWARM features 14 flies, all representing a different element of our rotten world. Liv embodies alt-right football hooligans, posh cokeheads, Tory horse girls, corrupt housing developers, and many more. Scurrying from one bombastic caricature to the next at a dizzying pace, Liv never shies away from a topic – confronting everything head-on and in entirely unexpected ways. Particularly well-executed are the ‘fruit fly’ and the ‘black fly’, which become send-ups of corporate pride performativity and anti-racist racists who show their hand by refusing even to say the word black. It is powerful to turn such terrible moments into riotously funny segments, one that cements Liv as a top-class performer.
Videographer Thomas Moen deserves a lot of praise for their glitchy politician video projection work in SWARM. Insidious, creeping horror ensues like an Adam Curtis documentary as visuals of the big crises of the modern day plays out behind all the characters. The House Fly’s history lesson on housing corruption over the past 40 years benefits greatly from these intense visuals. Notably, the projected videos and statistics never distract from the action onstage.
Liv is particularly fun to watch, and it’s clear the audience could have watched them for another hour. Their power over the crowd is a thing to behold. The audience practically begs Liv to slosh beer over them or target them in a moment of buzzy lust. Extra legs wiggling as they jump, dance, and sing, Liv as all 14 flies is a remarkably silly sight.
Despite the comedy, Liv includes a few profound and poignant moments. These moments build up slowly, so they never feel jarring. The last part of the show is an unflinching look at how hate and ambivalence have encouraged Britons to shrug off their role in the world’s toxicity—a masterful thing to do in such a comedic production.
It isn’t a particularly new idea to say that the world has felt bleaker and bleaker since 2016, yet solutions appear few and far between. Liv Ello’s SWARM shows us that we can confront these issues in honest and powerful ways without falling victim to feeling infinitesimally small. If a fly can do it, why can’t we?
VAULT Festival 2023 runs Tuesday 24th January to Sunday 19th March, full listings and ticket information can be found here.
This review was written by a participant of the VAULT Festival New Critics Programme in partnership with Theatre Weekly. For more information about the VAULT Festival New Critics Programme, and all of our 2023 participants, please visit: https://vaultfestival.com/new-critics-programme/
