Elouise Eftos: Aphrodite review – ‘Australia’s first attractive comedian’ asks if love is real

Pleasance Dome, Edinburgh 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 la