Elouise Eftos: Aphrodite review – ‘Australia’s first attractive comedian’ asks if love is real
Heckling herself in character as the Greek goddess, the standup delivers an intelligent, in-your-face show about sex and expectations
You can’t argue with the opening gambit of Aphrodite: “I’ve never been in love and I don’t think it’s real.” Consider me grabbed. This is the follow-up to Elouise Eftos’s fantastically provocative 2025 debut, Australia’s First Attractive Comedian, and it’s another intelligent, in-your-face hour about men and women, sex and expectations. OK, so it doesn’t administer the shock of the new quite like its predecessor, and Eftos’s argument about love is not as authoritative as her impossibly high status requires. But Aphrodite consolidates Eftos as a gripping new presence on the comedy scene.
It starts with a steamy pop video, with the Greek-Australian Eftos in character as goddess of love Aphrodite – who then heckles the comic in interrupting voiceovers for the remainder of the show. Eftos has an Aphrodite side, she tells us, but an Athena too – and she wants to be funny. That’s a combination forbidden to women, she posits, certainly if they want to find love with (whisper it) heterosexual men. That latter disappointing category of human is mocked here for its privilege, its fear of dancing, and because “being a straight man is a little bit gay”.
All of this is delivered with amusing hauteur by an act who styles herself as infinitely sexier and cleverer than we riffraff in the audience. There’s arresting material about the Eftos approach to flirting, the historical roots of misogyny (in medicine, in the church) and, as her tone turns more serious, about violent porn too. Visibly emotional, Eftos also tells the story of the life her grandmother led, one of brutally narrow marital and professional horizons.
That tells a powerful tale of gender injustice, and contextualises the comic’s scepticism of romance in a world where true equality is beyond us. But that’s an argument Eftos never quite lands, as she insists on being both equal and worshipped, bringing the show to a slightly indistinct end. But if Aphrodite doesn’t scale Olympian heights, it does offer us trenchant feminist thinking, all sorts of sass, and lots of ticklish gags about Gomez Addams and the secret sauciness of bus travel.
At Pleasance Dome, Edinburgh, until 30 August