After a sold out, five -star driving on 2024 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Wyld Woman: The Legend of Shy Girl Arrives in London for its long -awaited Southwark Playhouse Borough debut (October 23 – November 15, 2025). Written and performed by Isabel Renner and directed by Cameron KingSolo comedy has already been hailed as “a love letter to anyone who has ever believed the terrible lie that they are not cool enough.”
The show follows Shy Girl, a socially troubled young woman who prepares for her birthday party by repeating imaginary conversations – complete with index cards – in a desperate attempt to avoid social disaster. On the way, she turns into ten wild different characters, from a six-year-old therapist to the mysterious vagina goddess, and reveals the absurd, gripping and deeply human layer of shyness, longing and self-acceptance, and the audience has embraced it as both funny irreverent and unexpectedly moving movement that moves
In front of Shy Girl’s London debut, we sat down with Isabel Renner to talk about comedy as survival, the development of the show and what it means to finally bring a shy girl her dream home.
To start things, you can introduce yourself to our readers and give us a sense of what Wyld Woman: The Legend of Shy Girl Is it about? What aroused the idea and drew you towards creating this paragraph?
Hello! I am Isabel and I am a writer and artist from New York City. Wyld Woman: The Legend of Shy Girl Is my solo show that follows the titular shy girl’s attempt to get cool, desirable and experienced. Unfortunately, her only friend is and with her densely populated imaginary click-Henne therapist, who is actually just a six-year-old as she grandchildren.
I started writing the show to count on feeling like the most shy girl in the whole world. Apparently I did not talk all my first year at elementary school, and I have only made an increasing development of my social skills since then. But in seriousness I have always felt quite embarrassed by how intensely I experience social anxiety. I have tried to push it down and hide it, and it has never exactly helped. Wyldkvinna Has been an opportunity to actually put it and accept it – through legend, of all media: theater.
Shy Girl feels deeply personal and immediately recognizable. How much of her is deducted from your own experiences, and how much is the invention or imagined as an alter-ego?
Shy Girl really originated from my own life, but she has grown into a sweeter, cleaner, milder creature that was completely own hand. I started writing to her from a place of shame, and only years later I have realized that I could only dream of being as optimistic and sore and ‘Wyld’ a woman as she is. She is mythical in her brontë sister-level longing for true love, as well as in her passionate attempt at singing and dance (light spoiler alert).
Humor can cut deeply like a scalpel and protect like a shield – and it seems to be your most natural language. Why did comedy feel like the right vehicle for shy girl’s story? Or was it in some ways the only voice she could speak in?
Wonderful question! Forgive me while I cry. Okay I’m back! : D
I feel this has been the very riddle of my life. Ever since I was little, humor has been a way for me to both reveal and hide myself. But I think that for a shy girl, that’s not how she hides – that’s exactly what comes out of her clean and funny heart. Humor is ultimately shy girl’s most beautiful quality. She is so fixated on how shy and loser and unloved she thinks she is that she does not even notice how epic, powerful fun she has been all the time.
Throughout the performance, you slip between different characters, voices and perspectives. How did you develop this multi -layered storytelling style, and what makes it possible for you to capture about shy girl’s inner world?
I am obsessed with making characters. That’s how I fell in love with acting in the first place. I don’t think I’ve ever felt safer than when I’m covered in the impervious armor of an eccentric character. At the beginning of the pandemic, I started to come up with these ridiculous characters and record videos of myself like them. Then I wanted to weave them to a story-and what story do I know better than a story about socially troublesome late flowers? That way I could keep the research light.
The roles that these characters play in the shy girl’s world are inspired by moments from my own life, deeply exaggerated for dramatic effect: hide from my roommate by going to bed when the sun is still out; Cowering for my scary manager; Chasing gynecologists around the city to fix my question of being physically unable to lose my innocence to a man I was in love with (aka did not feel remotely comfortable with). Personas are all beautifully bizarre because the shy girl’s hold of the world is quite beautiful bizarre.
You also chose to wear it alone on stage. How did you land on the solo format over ensemble, and what helps you maintain the physical and emotional intensity night after night?
I was too shy to ask someone else to be in it with me! Just kidding – nature. I was drawn to the form because of my love for character work. It allows me to play with these chameleonic rapid changes, which are my favorite things ever. The audience is just about what helps me maintain the intensity to carry it alone. The audience is the magic Elixir that really brings the show to life. They are shy girl’s advice, and their support keeps her (and me) going.
You worked closely with director Cameron King to shape the piece. What did that collaboration come up with – whether it is tone, structure or performance – which you may not have discovered on your own?
Cameron is the second Magic Elixir who has brought the show to life. She and I met at Laguardia High School in New York City, where we were respective, two very cool and very unkind thirteen -year -olds. She has spent the last three years developing the show with me, and all the funniest and most memorable aspects of the show have come from her. She is fun and intuitive and knows how to raise a seemingly random moment to something completely iconic. Blowjob Ballet? All her idea. (If it piques your interest, come and see the show!)
The show has been described as “a love letter to anyone who ever thought they are not cool enough.” Do you have to perform it catartically for you? And what is the most memorable answer you got from someone who saw themselves in a shy girl?
My God, it has been so catartic. I have performed it for strangers, family, friends, crushes, enemies, older and those I am older. And the audience is strongly involved in the show. Direct eye contact is maintained (how is it too shy?). It has been so liberating to see all these people in the eye and kind of preaching, “Yes, this is who I am”, and meets so much encouragement and laughter and acceptance.
I have received such confirmatory answers. Someone in Edinburgh announced me after a show and told me all about their experiences feeling shy and alone. They ended the message with, “Thanks for today. I cried a few times and felt a great sense of kinship.” It made me cry a few times and feel a great sense of kinship. I think that what was so wonderful about Edinburgh discovered how people in all different demographics related to it-how even a 60-year-old man can have an inner shy girl.
And now a shy girl – literally traveling. From children’s and Taco cellars to New York, Edinburgh and now London, how has the work developed with each new audience? And what does this Southwark Playhouse debut represent for you?
The earliest iterations of Wyldkvinna were at these very unconventional spaces around New York. These sets showed us how critical it was to deepen the audience throughout the action (ie shy girl trying to lose her innocence on a table full of sitting protectors). This is where we attached to the work’s composition-and told a story about this intensely shy lady that makes all these intensely o-timid things in real time.
Edinburgh was this sky field of inspiration. It was a chance to witness these magnificent, unique artists and belong to a society – happy girl’s deepest desire. But London. Oh, London. No one loves the English as a shy girl. Her most romantic memory is a scene from My fair lady. When she fantasizes about her unhappy American crusher, she gives him a British accent. She thinks sex should feel like a funny look over a Downton Abbey Dinner table. It feels like both a miracle and the most unquestionable in the world to take a shy girl to her dream home.
Shy girl longs for the classic brands of “cool” – sex, cigarettes, new friends. Did you satirize the cultural myths or reflect your own relationship with them? And has your idea of ”cool” shifted over time?
I definitely reflected more on my own complicated relationship with them. I was so ashamed of how late-flower-I felt in high school and college. I associated with having sex and smoking and drinking and drug (it can be a verb, right?) With Capital-C Cool People. It was as if these cool people had been given some kind of manual with instructions to promote longer and further up the steps for young people. And this manual had somehow missed my door-or I had missed the delivery while inventing relatively chaste love stories in my head, or visited the dentist, or whatever less than cool time I was up to then.
I guess I still have this subconscious desire that people think I’m more experienced than I am-even about my baby-hearing disposition probably excludes someone from believing that I did Molly at twelve or had a triple-digit body bill after twenty age. But my definition of cool has definitely changed over time. I used to think of being cool meant being popular in school and smoking cigarettes from aesthetic necessity. Now I think almost everyone I’ve ever met is pretty cool. I mean, being human is … like … humiliating vulnerable. And we all get up and go down the street and try to connect despite that. For me, it’s about as cool as it gets.
For many people with social anxiety, the mind becomes a kind of hidden scene – repeated conversations, private rituals, imagined companions. Has the inner life felt more like a burden or a source of creative power for you?
Inner life is my ultimate refuge. As a child, I would repeatedly retreat to imaginary worlds; I did it almost compulsive. But when I look back on it now, I realize that I would dare inward in times of increased loneliness. It is a real love for a handling mechanism. This deep connection to inner life has made creativity not only my joy, but my nutrition-daily bread of energy. (Unfortunately, it was strange.)
For those who recognize themselves in a shy girl, what have you learned about turning shyness into a strength? Are there small documents that you would really recommend?
I seriously believe that shy people are the most valuable people in the world. I don’t even have good words to formulate it. It’s just like “woah, you’re so valuable, i love you.” I think that’s my recommendation. If you imagine the shyest part of yourself as a little puppy or the sweetest four-year-old child in the world and says, “Woah, you are so valuable, I love you” -I feel it would help. Also write a show about being shy for …
And finally – I look ahead, what types of stories or themes are you most anxious to explore the next?
I am drawn to some kind of story about the search for unconditional love and the divine and exceeds this deadly form. And something about a traveling carnival. Also, maybe a villain of origin. It is obvious that I train some strange things in my subconscious.
Book your tickets now at Southwark Playhouse before Shy Girl takes her last bow!
It was our conversation with Isabel Renner about wit, chaos and heart behind Wyld Woman: The Legend of Shy Girl. Share your thoughts with us on X/Twitter and and discover more exclusive interviews and features on Celebmix!
