[usr 5]

Here we are in a show within a show with meta narrative abounding. Our “Liz Kingsman” is the character and the driver. It is her show and she plans to film it to show others who couldn’t come and yet might be deemed more important? She jumps from playing ‘herself’ and all the characters she interacts, prompting us as she names them – she never names herself.

I do not want to mislead – but this show truly is a laugh a minute. 

The audience were all as one , both laughing knowingly and mesmerised by this meta-theatre story within story structure and we know what she is doing but enjoying the sense of being gulled. With brilliant comic timing and the success of the writing – she herself prompts us to agree – over and over hitting the nail on the head – we all get her, she is “relatable”.

Are we gullible, or is she?

The narrative is a dry, mocking parody of being the every-woman as she is ‘expected’ to be and embeds the womansplaining to disarm the audience. Very contemporary meta one-woman-show she engages us by direct address throughout. At first as she steps outside her device and then into the realm of the worlds and spaces and places she invites us into.

I love Fleabag on television, that in itself was a one-woman-show before it was developed for the BBC. Liz Kingsman in her own way styles this as a version of this meta-genre, of taking us along her own dissembling style guide. At times she is both inside and outside the action as meta-theatre. Beginning the play speaking directly to the audience about filming the show, jumping from play-within-the play to being in character. She disrupts her own authorship and brings us ‘in on it’.  The delivery, timing and intention has us exploding with communal guffaws.

Moments she toys with us and then collects us with gifts of the comedy architect – shelved notions re-visited so ‘knowingly’ – with an indelible stop, stay and hesitation before she goes on – a mere glance to her audience and we are in on the gag. 

What a directorial success. The explosion of sound and lights to escalate the action and at times a counterfeit for the wonderful theatrical devices maintained.  Our “One Woman” steps off the higher than usual desk chair/stool that sits centre stage, as the device that places her in various scenes, and places and times, and with the same refined gesture and as if a space cosmonaut stepping into slo mo spacewalk of the unknown, she takes us into flashbacks. And then in the next notion she plays with the sense of yesterday, tomorrow, last week and her own relived time continuum. Oh, joyful recognition. 

Liz creates worlds and characters with gestural and accented tropes we instantly accept and then she gently mocks that acceptance later in the narrative. We explode in being caught out. She got us. She gets us.

I particularly liked her boss, the ex-pat Aussie, Dana. Perhaps because we so instantly accept Liz Kingsman as a ‘pom’ who performed successfully in the Edinburgh fringe, and yet she is so seamlessly Australian.

ONE WOMAN SHOW, directed by Adam Brace,  is playing the Playhouse at the Sydney Opera House until the 19th February 2023.

sydneyoperahouse.com/events/whats-on/theatre/2023/one-woman-show.html#

Featured image : Liz Kingsman in ‘One Woman Show’ at the Sydney Opera House. Production photography by Dylan Woodley