One-Woman Show review

Even though it is only January, Liz Kingsman is at least on the shortlist to be this year’s overnight success story (despite already having a raft of TV acting credits to her name, including Down from London, which she co-created and wrote with Sharon Horgan’s Merman Productions). 

It’s a delicious irony that Kingsman’s very meta show, a send-up of the ‘messy woman’ trope, of which Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag is the most stratospherically successful example, may do the same for the person who has deconstructed it. 

Kingsman spent a year observing one-woman shows, often the recourse of talented female performers who aren’t being given a chance to work on interesting roles. One-Woman Show satirises every aspect of the genre, from the convenient best friend (“you’ve got to talk to me – it’s literally the only reason I’m here”) to the pervasive first-person present tense that those shows adopt. Even the lighting, by Daniel Carter-Brennan, is ironic.

Kingsman plays a version of herself who is at once desperate for fame and rather disdainful of her audience. Her show-within-a-show is Wildfowl, featuring an unnamed female character who ticks all the usual ‘messy woman’ boxes – a quirky job, a lack of direction, a non-stop, colourful sex life. Kingsman uses this narrative to interrogate the female confessional monologue format and what it says about the arts industry and the pressures it places on women. 

The character of Dana, her boss in Wildfowl, adds another dimension to the script by analysing the problematic nature of the messy-woman genre. Dana dissects the tropes that Kingsman’s character sets up, including a monologue about whether we still need to be talking about women masturbating, or whether we’ve accepted that it’s just normal and private. 

Some of the surreal twists of language – “I fell asleep with her lap on my head” and “I’m doing a remember” – tip the balance from being a clever show into something that is also appealingly silly and fun to watch. Kingsman always keeps the audience on-side: we are in on the joke, even when the joke takes off its clothes to reveal a totally different joke hiding underneath.

In the speech at the end, the meta layers fall away as Kingsman’s character talks about how she respects the women she’s sending up. They’re making their own work because there still aren’t enough opportunities for women. It’s a good speech and I have a hunch it’s altered slightly for this extra-extended run, to reflect all the success this show has already won. But she shouldn’t feel guilty – this is a format designed to allow the performer to shine, and she dazzles.