Liz Kingsman: ‘At first, I got really hung up on people misinterpreting One Woman Show’

Liz Kingsman seems distracted. We’re sipping coffees in the National Theatre foyer, and the most in-demand woman in UK live comedy is looking around, excitedly spotting things. “I’m going to take a photo of that and send it to my designer,” she tells me, pointing at a lectern across from us. It’s possible to put her slightly giddy, nervous energy down to the fact that her smash hit One Woman Show is opening shortly in the West End. Her eyes roam around for things she might use as props on stage; next, she alights on an extremely cute dog padding around with its owner. “I didn’t know dogs were allowed in here,” Kingsman says, eyebrows raised in excitement. “That’s going to change things, I’m afraid. That’s going to change things for this venue.”

This latest run of One Woman Show, a sharp, hilarious parody of the trend for solo plays by actor-writers about life as a cosmopolitan young woman (à la Fleabag) will be its biggest yet – the latest stop in its wild ride of runaway success, following endless extended runs and five-star reviews. Kingsman plays an exaggerated version of herself, a jobbing actor who is taping her self-penned solo show so that she can send it to a TV commissioner in the hope of becoming the next big thing. Meta? Absolutely. Genius? Undoubtedly.

The thirtysomething writer and actor (a recent British Vogue interview noted her delight in never revealing her exact age to journalists) debuted the show in 2019 as a scratch performance for an audience of her closest friends. That snowballed into a short run at the Vault Festival, then the Soho Theatre, the Edinburgh Fringe (from which came an inevitable Comedy Award nomination), and now, six weeks in the Ambassadors Theatre immediately followed by the Sydney Opera House in the city she grew up in. Along the way, she’s become a feverish word-of-mouth sensation, topped year-end lists and even recruited Kit Harington to star in the show’s trailer. That hype means that “obviously, I’m terrified” – but she needn’t be. Having seen Kingsman perform One Woman Show to intimate, bijou London audiences as well as huge Fringe crowds, I can maintain that, in both settings, it’s one of the funniest shows I’ve ever seen – sarcastic, smart and silly.

Kingsman has been carefully shepherding the show in all its iterations for years. “Carefree is not my forte,” she admits, although an Aussie twang is discernible in her voice as she grows more comfortable in our conversation. Her background is in sketch comedy, having performed as part of sketch trio Massive Dad (called “lovingly stoopid” by The Guardian’s Brian Logan in 2015) alongside Tessa Coates and Stevie Martin who she met at university in Durham.

One Woman Show, she says, was created in that improvisational style. “The writing of it was far more elastic,” she says, rolling her eyes at her own choice of word. “So wanky.” Kingsman means that it wasn’t created through strict scripting sessions, but rather by seeing what consistently works and doesn’t with audiences. “I call it death row for jokes, [where] you’re like, ‘You better do good tonight, joke, because this is your last shot,’” she says. “If you’ve seen it twice, you’ll know that… I definitely am reacting to what the audience wants.”

I’ve actually seen One Woman Show three times, but don’t tell Kingsman because, obviously, I want her to think I’m cool. I’ve seen an endless number of the kind of shows she’s parodying and her character is from a milieu that’s familiar to me. There’s a relatability to her on-stage persona, but the show also puts my generation’s flaws and foibles under the microscope. “You’re not a mess, you just want to be seen as one,” Kingsman’s heroine is told by her boss Dana (the voice of reason in the show and the only time Kingsman uses an Australian accent), questioning whether the messy millennial woman trope has in fact just led to more limiting and oppressive sexist stereotypes.

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Kingsman did her research, strapping herself in to watch one-woman shows back-to-back at the Vault Festival or Brighton Fringe to study the form. People make this kind of theatre, she says, because it’s more accessible – something she knows from experience. It cost just £250 to hire the Camden People’s Theatre for her first performance – “not to be sniffed at”, but somewhat reasonable compared to the money needed to stage a full-on play or make a TV pilot.

To me, it was always clear that this was a show with great reverence – not disdain – for women and their art. Kingsman says some early reviews “misunderstood” One Woman Show, reading it as a direct parody of Fleabag or even feminism itself, ripping female-led stories to shreds. That reading was never her intention, she says. The one-woman shows she’s seen have all been “incredible” and she was upset by the notion people might think differently. “I think at first, I got really hung up on that stuff, because you’re like, it’s out there, it exists, it’s on the internet forever,” she says.

But where that fear of being misinterpreted would have once held her back, she’s learnt to separate the version of herself on stage from her reality. She asks if I’ve seen the Apple TV+ sci-fi series Severance, where people have work memories and personal life memories they can switch on and off. “Since I’ve watched that TV show, I’m like, ‘Oh, that’s how I’m able to get on stage,’” she says. “I’m just severed… I’ll do anything if I’m in a character, especially if it’s going to elicit a laugh. I don’t feel the inhibitions.” She pauses and sighs. “I just think it’s weird to be severed.”

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Throughout our conversation, she wrestles between self-deprecation and wanting to be proud of her achievements. For Kingsman, an Australian who’s lived in the UK her whole adult life, playing things down comes naturally to her; it’s a significant feature in both national senses of humour. Still, she says she only began questioning it when filming her French-language comedy Parlement (think The Thick of It with MEPs) with actors from across Europe. “The self-deprecating thing doesn’t translate to the French because I say self-deprecating things all the time,” she says. “Sometimes the French people think I’m being sincere and they’ll be like, ‘Oh, no, no’ and I’m like, ‘Oh, that’s just how I speak.’”

Parlement has never been shown in the UK but Kingsman cheekily suggests that it could be a Call My Agent-like hit for Netflix, leaning into my phone, pretending it’s a direct line to the streamer. However, she bats away any suggestion of turning One Woman Show into its own TV programme, saying – given the running gag about its protagonist’s desperation to get a telly commission – she’ll “have a nosebleed because of the irony”.

Once she’s lit up the West End, Kingsman would love to do a New York run of One Woman Show in the home of live comedy. She’s also keen to write and direct films – but first she’ll be finally sleeping, after dedicating nearly four years of her life to this project. “The thing that is motivating me the most in the world is that on February 20th, I just float in the Pacific Ocean for hours,” she says. That is, if she doesn’t get distracted by a cute dog first.

‘One Woman Show’ runs at the Ambassadors Theatre from 14 December 2022 to 21 January 2023