WYLD WOMAN: THE LEGEND OF SHY GIRL

Southwark Playhouse Borough

★★★★

“Renner’s script flows beautifully even though it meanders madly”

Most people, at some point in their life, have had an imaginary friend. Being shy isn’t necessarily a prerequisite for this, but it often goes hand in hand. It is liberating, like talking to a pet. One can be candid, loquacious and fearlessly honest – traits that might elude us when plunged into social situations. Not many of us, however, have switched this idea on its head. What is it actually like to be that imaginary friend? Well, the answer lies in Isabel Renner’s raunchy one-woman show, “Wyld Woman: The Legend of Shy Girl”. Renner has a theatre full of fantasy companions, and it is an absolute joy to be in their company.

Renner is the eponymous ‘shy girl’, on the cusp of throwing her first house party. She is unnamed, but we are all given tags to write our own names on as we take our seats. Some of us are seated at a table onstage, with paper cups and plates – doubtlessly pilfered from a child’s birthday party. Lucy Fowler’s realistic, studio apartment set is dominated by shades of pastel pink, offset by the optimistic glamour of silver balloons. Into this setting, ‘Shy Girl’ shuffles, hunched under the weight of her anxiety. Fidgety and nervous, and somewhat geeky – in a pared down, Emo Philips kind of way. But don’t be fooled. She may be cripplingly inhibited, but Renner herself doesn’t shy away from giving a captivating and assured performance. One that takes some unexpected turns, especially when she adopts other characters. Don’t take your maiden aunt to this show – the language is quite graphic and explicit. She’s pretty forthright, particularly when describing her first fumbling forays into foreplay. By now she has stripped down to a ludicrously Paris-themed, spangly leotard while confessing to still being a vegan “sorry… a virgin – I get them mixed up!”.

Renner’s script flows beautifully even though it meanders madly. And just as polished is Renner’s ability to switch into other characters. We meet her insufferable flatmate, Memphis; we witness her confrontations with her restaurant boss, Patrice, who would give Miranda Priestley a run for her money. Her work-mate and first-date, Pino, is hilariously and satirically portrayed (reminder – keep your maiden aunt away), as is Twilight, her sex therapist; and a leering Rock Star; and finally a gorgeous imitation of a precocious six year old – who happens to be Shy Girl’s unwitting life coach, analyst and confidante rolled into one. Each orbital character is outrageous, yet authentic and comically observed.

As Shy Girl, she is suitably self-deprecating, but beneath the outlandish humour there are layers of vulnerability. ‘You are so quiet it is hard to connect with you’ is a comment repeatedly aimed at her. The ‘cool guys’ (she calls them ‘legends’) that she invites to her party don’t show up. She has to make do with us – her imaginary friends. The relationship she builds is real and organic, and probably different from night to night, but Renner adapts with ease to the situation. It is an intimate experience that gets to the heart as well as our funny bones. While we are laughing loudly, we are quietly uncovering truths within ourselves.

Cameron King’s sharp direction makes good use of the furniture, taking advantage of Renner’s suppleness as she stretches across the table, mounts the fridge or changes an imaginary light bulb. Each movement is a cue for a joke. And each joke, a cue for something else unexpected. Renner knows that shyness is no joke, but by turning it into comedy it makes us receptive to the reality. But enough of the psychobabble, just go along for the party. She’ll be absolutely thrilled you turned up. And so will you.

WYLD WOMAN: THE LEGEND OF SHY GIRL

Southwark Playhouse Borough

Reviewed on 24th October 2025

by Jonathan Evans

Photography by Charlie Lyne

Previously reviewed at Southwark Playhouse venues:

LIFERS | ★★★ | October 2025

THE CHAOS THAT HAS BEEN AND WILL NO DOUBT RETURN | ★★★★★ | September 2025

THE ANIMATOR | ★★★ | August 2025

BRIXTON CALLING | ★★★★ | July 2025

THE WHITE CHIP | ★★★★ | July 2025

WHO IS CLAUDE CAHUN? | ★★ | June 2025

THE FROGS | ★★★ | May 2025

RADIANT BOY | ★★½ | May 2025

SUPERSONIC MAN | ★★★★ | April 2025

WILKO | ★★★ | March 2025

WYLD WOMAN

LIFERS

Southwark Playhouse Borough

★★★

“challenges the audience as it challenges the system”

There is a moment – in fact several – when lifer Lenny, full of illness and old age, repeats the story of the day he bought his young son a trampoline for his birthday.

Each time he tells the story afresh. Sometimes he tells it, precise in every detail, twice in the same breath without realising.

This is what prison must be like, we think. The same thing again and again, without colour, diversion or end. Tedium. Repetition. The only colour arising from memory.

Writer Evan Placey’s sense of authenticity is no surprise. He engaged with lifers to hear their stories, and it’s the detail that sticks: the quest not for paradise, but a better pillow.

Theatre company Synergy commissions new plays to challenge public perception of prisoners. To achieve this, Placey gives us not three dastardly scrotes full of violence and swagger but three old men railing against the quotidian travails of age. They are out of breath and, perversely, out of time. The bantering trio of Norton (Sam Cox), Baxter (Ricky Fearon) and Lenny (Peter Wight) could be playing poker down the Dog and Duck, such is their comfort with discomfort.

For Lenny, that half-reality feels more tangible. He is losing his memory. He has headaches. He doesn’t know where he is. But a referral to a specialist costs £960 and chances are he’s swinging the lead because they’re all wrong ’uns, right? A couple of Ibuprofen should do the trick.

Lifers, under Esther Baker’s direction, challenges the audience as it challenges the system.

Who cares?

Who cares about a fading lifer? As the prison doctor Sonya (Mona Goodwin) tells newbie warder Mark (James Backway), her father has been waiting eight months for a gall bladder op and he’s never had so much as a parking ticket. Mark thinks he can change the world, starting with helping Lenny on with his trackie bottoms. He has an uphill task.

Lenny’s story unfolds slowly. Yes, he is the old and infirm prisoner caught in a bureaucracy that might condemn him to death. But he also has a bloody past. His showdown with son Simian (also Backway) is the most effective passage of the play, though it feels flown in from an entirely different one.

That may be a flaw in the drama’s construction. For while the drama asks plenty of questions, it has so much on its plate it sometimes struggles on how to proceed, using the next question to divert from the lack of a previous answer. Or maybe there are no answers and that’s the point.

Into this world, designed in shades of institutional grey by Katy McPhee, the cast fits like a jigsaw. The two old lags bring gallows humour. Backway grows into the role of optimistic Mark (less a character than a point of view) but his Simian comes fully formed. Goodwin appears like an ambassador from the outside world, weary but with choices.

At the centre of all is Peter Wight as Lenny. He is formidable – one minute weeping, the next threatening. His memories, which fail him, fail him kindly, offering him a softer remembrance of horrors past.

The play doesn’t preach, it points. We shuffle in our seats. These are not easy people to care about. Do we even want to? Have we the capacity for more empathy in a roiling world of discord?

We leave the auditorium free to breathe fresh air and make our own way home. It is a small comfort and a huge relief.

WYLD WOMAN: THE LEGEND OF SHY GIRL

Southwark Playhouse Borough

★★★★

“Renner’s script flows beautifully even though it meanders madly”

WYLD WOMAN: THE LEGEND OF SHY GIRL

Southwark Playhouse Borough

Reviewed on 24th October 2025

by Jonathan Evans

Photography by Charlie Lyne

Previously reviewed at Southwark Playhouse venues:

WYLD WOMAN

WYLD WOMAN

WYLD WOMAN

LIFERS

Southwark Playhouse Borough

★★★

“challenges the audience as it challenges the system”

LIFERS

Southwark Playhouse Borough

Reviewed on 6th October 2025

by Giles Broadbent

Photography by Richard Southgate

Previously reviewed at Southwark Playhouse venues:

LIFERS

LIFERS

LIFERS

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