Eleanor Morton @ Monkey Barrel Comedy

Eleanor Morton’s new show starts with Christopher Columbus’s 1492 voyage in which he ‘discovered’ not only the New World, but something perhaps yet more wonderful: mermaids. 

So begins an odyssey through legend and folklore in which Morton draws a line between classical depiction of women’s bodies (or almost-women’s bodies) as mythical creatures, and the (often equally fanciful) depictions in teen magazines of her 2000s youth. 

As Morton appraises those myths for what exactly they say about the men who (mostly) made them up, she’s on firm ground. Her 2024 book Life Lessons From Historical Women showed a gift for smart and funny historical writing, and the same is very much on display here – as when she recasts Odysseus’s shipmast-lashed encounter with the sirens as “a story of workplace harassment”, involving his crew in a kink. Or the titular mermaid: a “woman without all the complicated bits, like voices and genitals”.

The material’s just as smart as she connects it up with the present day and, for example, the manosphere (“that’s my word for planet Earth”), or the still-lagging scientific interest in female bodies, even in the animal population, as evidenced by the only-recent discovery of the snake clitoris. 

For most of the show, Morton takes the form of her titular mermaid, tail and all, perched on seaweed-strewn rocks. As the show approaches its peak, she takes another, more "monstrous" form, manifesting her acute and well-articulated fury. But one wonders as she finally abandons her post whether something has been lost in tying down the performer for so long: it’s not that Morton doesn’t manage to be funny throughout, but that the show’s format has let it feel a little too often like a seminar, albeit a funny and interesting one.

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Eleanor Morton: The Mermaid, Monkey Barrel Comedy (Cab Vol 1), until 30 Aug (not Mon, Tue), 1pm, £13.50-16.50