ONE WOMAN SHOW
Sydney Opera House
Until February 9
★★★★★
One Woman Show, written and performed by Liz Kingsman, has received five-star reviews in the UK and seen its creator hailed as “Britain’s new queen of comedy”. Such a crowning, and dazzlingly exclusive spotlight, might be the very thing One Woman Show so expertly and hilariously shows up.
Liz Kingsman performs One Woman Show at the Sydney Opera House.Credit:Sydney Opera House
It’s not that Kingsman isn’t fantastic, or not creating a different kind of funniness. It’s that there seems room for only one breakthrough female comedy star, or new kind of comic portrayal of women, at a time.
One Woman Show, which is a show about one woman putting on a one woman show, is a joke-fest of large proportions.
Stuffed with word-play and meta tomfoolery, it fools with everything from water-drinking on stage to confessional first-person narration, stop-the-show performer-tech staff interaction and portrayals of liberated females losing their tousled minds over sexy, soulful, informed and caring dudes.
It’s also without a lull in entertainment or clever nonsense. One minute Kingsman is a performer agitated about the successful filming of her show, Wildfowl, for a TV pilot, the next minute she’s performing the solo work, about a woman working in marketing for a wildlife charity who narrates her life’s spinning chaos with exquisite self-importance and inanity.
“And it’s February now,” she says, concerned about getting the show’s recording to a TV commissioner the next day. “So they haven’t decided which woman is going to be successful this year yet.”
Kingsman includes so many familiar, and constrictive ways of portraying women in popular culture.
With her character, “stumbling through my 20s in a darkly funny, fiercely honest way”, the show is like a window to every beautiful but relatable, smart but down-to-earth, klutzy but honest female caricature with a strong, honest best friend around. If they’re running from a painful life event, even better.
Liz Kingsman on Friday night.Credit:Sydney Opera House
One Woman Show might inspire connections with Fleabag, but it’s far from a simple lampoon. It’s a splendid and well-crafted journey through ludicrous rom-com locations, earnest performance poetry, rich and entitled self-awareness and narrow ideas about what a woman in contemporary times is like.
But, essentially, it’s crackingly crafted, has a beautifully dry and dotty script and features a lot of bird-based humour. And, Kingsman is a very funny person who proves comedy sees through everything.
One Woman Show is at the Sydney Opera House until February 19.
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