Wyld Woman: The Legend of Shy Girl at Southwark Playhouse Borough

Last Updated on February 11, 2026

Isabel Renner’s one-woman show is a quick-witted tussle with social anxiety.

“You’re so quiet it’s hard to connect with you,” declares the love interest in Isabel Renner’s show, Wyld Woman: The Legend of Shy Girl. This shakes the protagonist’s emotional bedrock. In a high-energy, if uneven show about social pressure and interior dialogues, the perils of extreme timidity are wrung out for comic effect.

Isabel Renner’s Wyld Woman: The Legend of Shy Girl picks up the one-woman comedy baton from Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s 2013 Edinburgh show-turned-BBC Three sensation Fleabag and Liz Kingman’s brilliant 2023 West End hit, One Woman Show. It follows a frantically overthinking twenty-something-year-old as she tumbles through life with debilitating shyness. After a run (like Waller-Bridge) at Edinburgh Fringe, writer-performer Renner comes to London in this sparkly, pink-themed production directed by Cameron King (Butchery Lessons, 1 in a Chameleon) and produced by Catherine Schreiber (Burlesque, The Lehman Trilogy).

Shy Girl, the protagonist, desperately wants to be cool. She seeks friendship with the local “legends”, romance with a disinterested co-worker, and sexual prowess. Yet she continuously flounders in cycles of revelation, self-delusion and, of course, shyness.

We join her on her birthday as she awaits the arrival of trendy house guests. It’s this zone of anxious expectation that bookends the narrative, which Renner tells in flashbacks. She re-enacts awkward social situations alongside a voiceover; the comedic mode is self-scrutiny with the benefit of hindsight.

Shy Girl bursts with characters, voiced skilfully, all-at-once, by Renner. There’s the self-involved roommate, Memphis, the dorky love interest, Pino, or the six-year-old therapist (yes), Shelly, among many others. Swift exchanges with these personas are skilfully dramatised. Renner is an intensely agile performer, inhabiting people – mannerisms and gait included – at pace. Her accents are well-pitched; her timing is incisive. She is clearly a student of the witty one-liner (“TED talks are my drug of choice” drawls Pino in an attempt at edgy flirting).

Four audience members join Shy Girl on stage, sitting at the kitchen table, incorporated into jokes and addressed as presences of her inner world. Without changing props, Renner’s gestural comedy morphs the set – a balloon-decorated New York apartment – into many other locations. For example, in classic slapstick style, she turns the room into a subway entrance by slowly descending behind the table. The space becomes an upmarket French restaurant with imaginary tables, then a gynaecologist’s consulting room, kitchen sideboard-stroke-examination table to boot. Transitions are made slick by Renner’s talent for physical humour, which smooths over the inflexibility of the set. The lighting (Catja Hamilton) and sound (Sasha Howe) designers deserve great credit for delivering an immersive feel that significantly enlivens the comedy.

Yet it is precisely this diversity of characters and places that hamper the integrity of Renner’s central voice. In crowding the production with moving parts – personas, locations, plot twists – the play forfeits genuine intimacy with Shy Girl herself. The best one-woman stage shows of recent years (nodding to Liz Kingsman here) develop a sophisticated central voice to which all comedy is anchored. The plausibility of the protagonist is the point around which all parts turn. It is our sense of a real person navigating real problems that keeps the comedy – ridiculously inadequate lovers, or jabs at everyday sexism – alive. For all her quick wit, Renner’s Wyld Woman trips at this hurdle.

Beyond her shyness, who is Shy Girl? How old is she? (She seems a bizarre hybrid of young teenager and independent, apartment-renting adult.) Where is her family? What, beyond social acceptance, does she hope for? Without a solid architecture of character, it becomes impossible for the comedy to fledge from pithy statements and (sometimes cheap) gags into meaningful social commentary. The constant subtext of its humour – chronic shyness – wore thin by the end, leaving little room for deeper emotional connection with the protagonist.

In this way, the production worked itself into comedic dead ends. We leave Shy Girl largely where we found her. She’s more sexually experienced, yes, and she has expanded her social circle, but the rules of the game – and her relationship to these rules – are the same. Cool people’s opinions still define her sense of self; she does not really see through her ex-lover’s banal egotism.

Wyld Woman is full of sharply delivered observations and impressions. It is an impressive feat of solo performance. But fullness of character, development of voice and honest realisation are what make the best of this genre tick.

Wyld Woman: The Legend of Shy Girl runs at Southwark Playhouse from 23rd October to 15th November.

Southwark Playhouse Borough
Newington Causeway,
London
SE1 6BD

Looking for something different? Check our review of The Unbelievers, currently running at the Royal Court Theatre.