“What a burn. What a triumph.“
Gary Nunn
5 Stars
Sydney Opera House
till 19 February
Liz Kingsman is a name that, if you don’t know now, you soon will.
Before she even opened her international debut of ‘One Woman Show’ at the Sydney Opera House on Friday, it had already become the stuff of legend.
The Sydney-born writer and actor has had a reverse-trajectory to the more trodden path for Australian talent. ‘One Woman Show’ won accolades after being staged at London’s Soho Theatre, the Edinburgh Fringe and then a rare London West-End transfer, which made her the toast of the town.
So when she brought it to home shores in Australia, that most dangerous of things was set: high expectations.
She does not disappoint, bringing to her hometown a sardonic, hilarious and energetic monologue which lightly satirises the female-driven narratives that’ve come before it. It’s a show, she wryly remarks, “driven by bitterness and jealousy” which takes audiences on a ride through her 20s “in a fiercely honest and comedic manner.”
Of course, the irony is, nothing is honest here; Kingsman has created a dry, seemingly nonchalant persona whose story becomes more meta and more deliciously ridiculous the further in you get. It teeters between absurdist and gently poignant in a knowing way, with a self-referential obsession about appearing “relatable” in order to come across as likeable.
We begin with Kingsman waking up after a one night stand, alarmed to find the creepy man has pictures of her all around his flat. Then she realises she’s actually in her own flat. It’s the first of many lightly absurdist reveals which starts a comic pace that barely relents for 70 minutes, such is the expertise of her dry delivery.
Kingsman is working at a Wetlands charity in marketing. It involves, she says “90% of the time posting pictures of birds on social media, and the other 10% doing whatever marketing is.”
The “hot mess” trope popularised by Bridget Jones and Fleabag is lampooned, but in such an indirect way, you don’t need to have seen them to be in on the joke.
We’re given an insight into her chaotic love life: an 8-foot tall office crush she’s constantly trying to impress; another man who wants to mimic the behaviour of some of the birds she posts about by only reuniting annually to mate, with zero contact in between.
In a later plot twist, the office crush isn’t all he seems – and she explicitly spoon feeds us the clues she laid that led us to this moment. It shows us how the sausage is made in these usual suspenseful drip-feeds of story – and by doing so, reveals how easily we’re manipulated to give away our empathy and credulousness.
In a subplot, the show is being filmed for a TV special, and when we learn the cameras or sound haven’t been working, she asks “what’s the point, then?” It’s an eloquent way of inviting us to reflect on why stories are told – for the pleasure of the audience, or the glory of the teller?
Flashbacks (“rememberings”) show us Kingsman’s northern university dorm mate, someone she introduces as a plot device to tell us something about female friendship. They’re often snuggled in the same bed dorm. In one instance, “she lets me rest my lap on her face” – mocking the inane one dimensional titillation of the portrayal of female friendships without the murkier and darker complexities any friendship can contain: jealousy, suspicion, exasperation.
The lighting and sound tell brilliant, inventive and gratifying narratives of their own – a solo blinking light reflecting the migration of one of her love interests; the loud ugly growl-buzz of the office coffee machine revealing how obnoxious the sound is, before Kingsman admits she doesn’t even drink coffee and dumps in in the lunchbox of a frazzled charity intern. It’s brilliantly observed, fresh comedy at its very best.
The one liners are too good to repeat as spoilers here, but include the nugget: “There’s nothing more sad and desperate than a middle class woman on her own in a nightclub.” The irony and lampoonery of female narratives we recently held dear adds a layer of comic sophistication that moves us all forward.
It’s Dana, Kingsman’s boss at the not-for-profit, that breaks us from Kingsman’s British accent into an Australian one to deliver the lines that bring us closest to our learning moments, suggesting the Aussie frankness trumps the British famed politeness and euphemism to cut to the heart of the matter.
“You’re not a mess – you just want to be seen as one,” she says to Kingsman, a line which encapsulates the tone of the show.
What a burn. What a triumph.
Gary Nunn, Theatre Now
