Here’s a good start to the new year. A show that dismantles old assumptions but fizzes with its own life. One Woman Show has sparkled into the West End via the Vaults, Soho and Edinburgh. At first it seems that Liz Kingsman is simply going to use Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag as a satirical trampoline. There is an elliptical allusion to a collision with “a bridge” as a foundational experience, and she describes waking up in a disorientatingly strange bed, which turns out to be her own. At work at the Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust (yes, there is eventually a gag about being foul and wild) she unleashes a wanky speech about masturbation, which her Australian boss thinks could do with being reined in a bit. There is a lot of booze, a tricky ex-boyfriend, a burgeoning new romance, an all-purpose best friend.
Much to recognise; but the evening, which is framed as if it is being ineptly filmed, flies beyond parody. Kingsman dances her way out of box after box. And points out what she is up to, just before her audience notice. Every bit of predictable plotting or fatty phrasing is picked to pieces as she sends up the loquacious, intimate, supposedly unflinching but actually indulgent monologue in a loquacious, intimate etc etc: “I am so relatable.”
