F**king Swans review: a marriage built on everything left unsaid

Four queer women, one sofa and a marriage running out of things to say, reviewed at Omnibus Theatre's 96 Festival.

The cast of F**king Swans gathered around the sofa during a scene at Omnibus Theatre, London

Written by

Dean Addams

Article type :

Critic Review

Published on

11 Jun 2026

F**king Swans opens with a nearly empty bottle of wine. Harper is carrying it home from Ronnie's parents, Ronnie points out that it's already finished, and almost in the same breath Harper tells her she's pregnant. It's a sharp, uneasy way to start a play, and for a few minutes it feels like Elise Marra's script knows exactly what it's doing.

Then that thread mostly disappears. The drinking comes up again at Ronnie's leaving party, where Harper's oldest friend Lindsey calls her out and gets nothing but hostility back, and after that it barely gets mentioned again until Ronnie returns from deployment years later and blames Harper for their son James's disability, fetal alcohol syndrome being a known risk. It's the thing the play eventually blames everything on, and yet it spends most of the evening barely looking at it.

That's the pattern across the whole evening, really. F**king Swans is about a twenty year relationship breaking down because of things that go unsaid, and somewhere along the way the production decided the audience should feel that too. When Ronnie finally asks Harper why she wants a divorce, Harper's answer is "I don't owe you an explanation." Fair enough, within the marriage. But I was sitting there for most of the play's ninety minutes wanting exactly that explanation, and when it finally arrives, at Carol's funeral, under an umbrella, to use Harper's words, "It's too late."

Maybe that's the point. Maybe the idea is to put the audience where Ronnie's been for years, working with half a picture, and I can see that as a choice. It just didn't bring me closer to Harper. If anything it pushed me further off.

Carol is the one performance I'd go back for. Played by Kelly Lamor Wilson, who also produces the show, she's the only person on that stage who says what she actually thinks, and she does it with warmth and humour even when nobody's listening. There's a scene where she tries to talk about how unhappy she is in her sex life with Lindsey and the others laugh it off, and somehow that's one of the most honest moments in the whole play. Carol is diagnosed with cancer and dies towards the end. It's just a shame her own funeral ends up being about Ronnie and Harper again rather than about her.

The set is built around a sofa in Ronnie and Harper's living room, and the idea is clearly that this is a couple who can no longer share the same space. The staging itself works better than that idea sounds on paper, scenes move into each other easily, and there's a real sense of being let into these women's lives, close enough to feel like you're sitting on the edge of that sofa with them.

But when Harper is alone on stage, she's collecting post, opening curtains, drinking tea, reading magazines, looking about as settled as anyone ever looks. None of it matches the loneliness and resentment she talks about later, and by the time those revelations come, they land softer than they should.

A few other things never quite come together. Lindsey is introduced as someone who steals candles and bath products, then later turns out to have a proper career, and the two versions of her don't really meet. Ronnie is supposedly an army sergeant, but for most of the night she's the more passive, more easily hurt of the two leads, which is its own kind of interesting until you remember we're told otherwise. And the title itself comes from an anecdote about Ronnie being attacked by swans on their honeymoon in Italy, which only surfaces near the very end and doesn't really attach itself to anything by the time it lands.

None of this is a problem with ambition. Marra is reaching for a lot here, military service, disability, addiction, grief, a marriage falling apart in slow motion, and underneath it there are real questions about what people owe each other after twenty years and what it costs to stay or to go. I stayed interested in those questions even when the play around them wasn't quite working. There's a genuinely strong cast holding it together, and Harrison's Ronnie carries real warmth even when the writing doesn't earn it. The Omnibus space suits the material too.

I just kept waiting for the play to let me in properly. By the time it finally did, I'd more or less stopped expecting it to.