Bebe Cave: Swoon

Swoon is a stand-up comedy show by Bebe Cave, an award-winning character comedian and actress, staged at Fairfield Social Club, a theatre on Irk Street in Manchester. It is a comedy with a historical setting and a satirical edge.

In Swoon, Bebe Cave looks at the idea of historical female main character syndrome and sets the material in the Victorian era, when men wore top hats and waistcoats and women did not yet have the vote. The comedy's lens is the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a group of painters, and the women who became their most famous muses.

Bebe Cave takes aim at the self-importance of male artistry and at the way women are cast as beautiful artistic objects, particularly once they are dead. The show asks why the painters who depicted them are so difficult and so much alive, turning art-historical figures into the targets of the humour.

The show is performed by Bebe Cave alone, on a stage at Fairfield Social Club, and combines stand-up with character comedy. Press quotes gathered for the production describe it as smart, slapstick and silly, and as a bizarre, breathless comedy.