Chaotic life, lots of sex, little sense of purpose … the Anglo-Aussie’s hilarious takedown of Fleabag and the booming ‘messy-woman genre’ was halted by Covid. Now, after a year and a half of worry, it’s finally back
Given the content of her smash-hit comedy One-Woman Show, there’s no little irony in interviewing Liz Kingsman. In the show, the Anglo-Aussie comic plays an ambitious, self-absorbed version of herself, here to share with us her formulaic (and, unbeknownst to her, blissfully funny) feminist monologue in the hope of emulating Phoebe Waller-Bridge and propelling herself from the fringe to the front page. And lo, here we now are, discussing how fantastic Kingsman is in a national newspaper. “I am extremely aware,” she laughs, “of the show eating itself. Anything that happens off the back of that show” – in career and profile terms, she means – “is extremely hypocritical of me.”
Since One-Woman Show is a terrific piece of work, I’d advise Kingsman to brace for extreme hypocrisy: the comedy world is surely hers for the taking. But does she want it? One-Woman Show, it turns out, interrupted a process whereby, “I’d closed the chapter on live comedy.” Comedy fans know Kingsman mainly as one-third (with Stevie Martin and Tessa Coates) of the top-notch sketch group Massive Dad. “I’d never had any desire to make a solo show,” she says. She did so only because “my agent needed a script from me, and I was like, ‘Yeah, yeah, I’ll definitely do that’ – then wrote this instead. This show is an elaborate form of procrastination for a different piece of work entirely.”
