Review: Wyld Woman: The Legend Of Shy Girl (Southwark Playhouse Borough)

Review by Stephen Gilchrist

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

As a reviewer, there is always the chance you can stumble upon the playwright of the century every couple of weeks. You can be accused of gushing over every year, but sometimes there is no other option but exaggerated enthusiasm, particularly when it comes to writer Isabel Renner’s Wyld Woman: The Legend Of Shy Girl.

Renner’s seventy-minute, one person show is an outstanding event in writing, performance and direction, the latter by Cameron King. Renner is a New Yorker who has authored this piece as an exaggerated account of her own self-claimed painful shyness. For equally as long, she says, she has wanted to be an actor. But this apparent contradiction has led to a remarkable play which is extremely funny, touching, sad, inspiring and even poetic.

The nameless Shy Girl’s pink-themed New York apartment, designed by Lucy Fowler with expressive lighting by Catja Hamiliton, is festooned with balloons as if in prospect of a birthday party. She expects some ‘cool’ guests and rewinds to bring the audience up to speed. There is a large central kitchen table, where the colour emphasises her sensitivity and a sense that the audience may or may not be her imaginary friends. Four audience members sit at the kitchen table with Shy Girl, and are immersed in her inner world as the fourth wall is breached.  She talks volubly, often also to individual audience members who have been asked to wear name tags. 

She talks about her shyness, her bestie flatmate, ‘Memphis,’ a sexually precocious woman, her job as a server at a celebrity-laden French restaurant, and her excited anticipation of a relationship with her co-worker, Pino. Shy Girl loves ‘legends’.  ‘Legends’ are New Yorkers she admires, those who are ‘cool’, who smoke cigarettes and have tattoos. Eventually, she has attracted the attention of some ‘legends’  as they see her rebut the sexual advances of an unnamed British rock star, a customer in her restaurant. She is so excited at such attention, and expects them to come to her birthday party. 

She also has a therapist, in fact a child therapist, to whom she gives an account of her life and shyness. That is to say the therapist actually is a six-year-old child, one for whom she babysits but who she treats as a confessor. After a sexual incident with the disdainful Pino’s ‘robotic’ finger, and a visit to a Germanic gynaecologist, she anticipates that this will lead to love ever after. As an incurable romantic she lives in the world of My Fair Lady. Her quiet demeanour and shyness with customers at the posh eatery at which she works leads to her boss to complain to her, due to her shyness, that Michael Caine may have lost out on the’ soup de jour’. She segues from one location to another with ease, and from one character to another with deftness.

She frequently confuses ‘vegan’ with ‘virgin’.  Shy Girl is inevitably let down by her erstwhile boyfriend-  “You’re so quiet it’s hard to connect with you” declares Pino, who appears to have an inflated belief in his own intellect and sexual prowess,  while dumping her- and she realises her flatmate isn’t such a bestie after all. Her life, finally and at the denouement, offers hope for her.

Why is this show remarkable? There is a brilliance in this piece which is hard to describe. The actor is talking about herself in a self-describing, self-critical, but not self-indulgent way, which is laugh aloud funny, whilst creating a  world into which the audience is drawn. It is raunchy, sexually explicit on occasion, with no hostages taken to language.  She does not seek self-pity, yet the audience is moved by her belief in her fantasy world-or is it?- in which she will find friends who are ‘legends’, and the perfect man, marriage and love. 

Renner gives an extraordinary performance. She creates multinational characters in her life who speak to her, with fast-paced exchanges cleverly depicted, accent perfect, and with physical movement, gesture, and expression.  I have described the writing as poetic. I do not mean that it is overly elegiac or lyrical. It is that the text and its delivery seem to have a rhythm and a sensitive expression of emotion which is aesthetically pleasing and a joy to listen to. Renner is a wonderful writer. 

I commend American Tony Award-winning producer, Catherine Schreiber for putting this show on/ Previously at the Edinburgh Festival and now a welcome addition to the London theatre scene, letting us enjoy an evening in the world of a timorous, sometimes delusional but thoroughly delightful Shy Girl. 

Wyld Woman: The Legend Of Shy Girl plays at Southwark Playhouse Borough until 15th November. Tickets from https://southwarkplayhouse.co.uk/productions/wyld-woman/

Photos by Charlie Lyne