Bebe Cave's multicharacter comedy Swoon, showing at the Pleasance Dome in Edinburgh, uses slapstick and physical comedy to satirise the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and examine how women were treated as passive muses rather than people with their own stories. The show explores the gap between the elevated artistic status given to figures like Elizabeth "Lizzie" Siddal, immortalised as Millais's Ophelia, and the poor treatment such women actually received, using comedy to expose the casual misogyny of the men who idolised them.

Cave plays numerous roles at speed, including Siddal and Siddal's fictional sister Bertrude, who longs for recognition from the pretentious Brotherhood, alongside other figures such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti and even a Victorian-style Tyra Banks and the Brontë sisters. Absurdist touches, including a redheaded mannequin, chaotic dance sequences and deliberately shabby costumes and props, sit alongside a sharper message about how art history has sidelined and sexualised its female subjects. The production runs at the Pleasance Dome, Edinburgh, until 30 August.