![]() (Supplied: Sequoia Ziff)Īfter she graduated, Kingsman settled on a different, related ambition to acting: directing. "My first year at Durham I lost a lot of my own dignity: just sort of drank a lot of beer and didn't dress nice and didn't have any money," says Kingsman. These years instilled a knack for "working under pressure in last-minute situations, like when you've got a show to open at 8pm and you're still halfway through your tech ," she says. And that's why people go so mad in their early 30s."Īt university, Kingsman adopted a British accent, began performing in student theatre, and met the people with whom she would start to write comedy. ![]() "But then when you get to 30, you can see the shadows of the decisions you're currently making you can see the impact that they're going to have in the future. And when you look back, and you see the shadows that it cast across your whole life, it's actually a bit terrifying to think about the whimsy with which you made a decision. "I think when you're 19, you make these decisions based on almost nothing. She describes the feeling of walking through the narrow corridors of the Ambassadors Theatre (a West End stalwart), as an announcement played over the loudspeaker backstage: "Liz Kingsman, this is your call to the stage." Kingsman grew up watching British comedies like Absolutely Fabulous and all-women sketch show Smack the Pony. Wow."), and that she felt in December when she debuted One Woman Show on the West End. It's the same excitement she feels days out from her first show at the Sydney Opera House ("Oh my God. It was during their end-of-year showcase that Kingsman first felt the buzz of being a performer behind the scenes: "You've got a quick change between your dances, and that thing of having all your stuff at the side and your hairspray," she says. We teased our hair and it was all very cool." "It felt genuinely like we were in a Step Up film - obviously, we weren't, because we were all on the Lower North Shore, but it felt like we were. Kingsman and her peers weren't "glittery and perfect" tiny jazz dancers – instead, for eisteddfods, they were encouraged to wear whatever they wanted, as long as it matched the loose theme. She would spend every afternoon, from the ages of eight to 13, at her dance school in Crows Nest.īut her dance studio wasn't like the others. The Sydney Opera House is a far cry from Kingsman's performing arts origins, learning to dance on the city's Lower North Shore. It's a stratospheric rise for a woman who most Australians have never heard of. They haven't decided which woman is going to be successful this year yet.") (She is circumspect about this kind of pronouncement in One Woman Show, her character quips: "It's February now. Kingsman has described the excess of cynically made confessional theatre following Fleabag as a "feeding frenzy". Kingsman, who started out in improv and sketch comedy, has even been crowned the "new queen of British comedy" by both The Times and Vogue. It has scored five-star reviews, with its UK seasons sold out and extended, and was nominated for best show at Edinburgh Fringe in 2022. Kingsman hopes its next stop will be New York. It transferred to the West End in December last year. ![]() One Woman Show debuted at London's Soho Theatre in 2021, and was dubbed the best comedy show of the year by The Guardian, beating out Bo Burnham's Netflix special Inside. If something cropped up in three shows, I'd be like, 'That can go in.' That way it doesn't feel like I'm punching down at something." It's tempting to call One Woman Show a parody of Fleabag, what with its protagonist talking proudly about having "very non-vanilla sex" or sitting perched on the edge of a red chair, looking into the middle distance.īut Kingsman stresses: "The show isn't based off that show … There's nothing in my show that's from any specific thing. But rather than parroting the tropes of these shows, Kingsman is skilfully skewering them. ![]() The Australian writer and performer wrote the play after sitting through countless one-woman fringe shows that had been described as "unflinching", "raw" and "honest". She's resolved to film the show for TV executives, hoping they'll commission a series. Kingsman's unnamed character is a fame-hungry playwright who decides to write and perform her own confessional monologue, Wildfowl. ![]() One Woman Show is a send-up of the slew of fourth-wall-breaking plays that followed in the wake of Waller-Bridge's original stage production of Fleabag in 2013. On stage, Kingsman shrugs: "I guess I'm just relatable." And now Liz Kingsman, the Sydney-born, UK-based writer and performer, is on the Sydney Opera House stage starring in her own One Woman Show, as "a woman stumbling through 20s in a fiercely honest, darkly comic way". ![]()
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