The comedian-writer’s One Woman Show takes hilarious issue with the Fleabag-style ‘messy woman’ trope. As it transfers to London’s West End, she says she feels ‘at odds’ with its success
What does it mean to capture the zeitgeist? Liz Kingsman isn’t sure, but whatever it is, she has caught it in her efficiently titled One Woman Show, which arrives in the West End next month after a sell-out run at the Soho theatre, which won her the South Bank Sky Arts breakthrough award, and on the Edinburgh fringe. It has been hailed as a pitch-perfect takedown of the “messy woman” comedy of Fleabag’s Phoebe Waller-Bridge and others. But its lineage goes back far further than that. “When the conversation around my show was homing in on this one particular piece of work that people thought I was sending up, I was like, no, this stuff’s been going on for a lot longer,” she says.
Not least as far back as Bridget Jones’s Diary, the film version of which she watched at school in Australia, “because it’s Pride and Prejudice, in the same way that Clueless is a modern version of Emma. It’s a fun update. And ‘Come the fuck on, Bridget’ is something I still regularly say to motivate myself to do anything – like when you’re sitting on the sofa with your dog, and you haven’t got up and done your work.”
