After a sold-out, five-star run at the 2024 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Wyld Woman: The Legend of Shy Girl arrives in London for its highly anticipated Southwark Playhouse Borough debut (23 October – 15 November 2025). Written and performed by Isabel Renner and directed by Cameron King, the solo 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 anxious young woman preparing for her birthday party by rehearsing imaginary conversations—complete with index cards—in a desperate attempt to avoid social catastrophe. Along the way, she transforms into ten wildly different characters, from a six-year-old therapist to the mystical Vagina Goddess, revealing the absurd, poignant, and deeply human layers of shyness, longing, and self-acceptance, and audiences have embraced it as both hilariously irreverent and unexpectedly moving
Ahead of Shy Girl’s London debut, we sat down with Isabel Renner to talk about comedy as survival, the evolution of the show, and what it means to finally bring Shy Girl her dream home.
To kick things off, could you introduce yourself to our readers and give us a sense of what Wyld Woman: The Legend of Shy Girl is all about? What sparked the idea and pulled you toward creating this piece?
Hi! I’m Isabel, and I’m a writer and performer from New York City. Wyld Woman: The Legend of Shy Girl is my solo show that follows the titular Shy Girl’s attempt to become cool, desirable, and experienced. Unfortunately, her only friend—aside from her densely populated imaginary clique—is her therapist, who is actually just a six-year-old for whom she babysits.
I started writing the show to reckon with feeling like the shyest girl in the entire world. Apparently, I didn’t speak my entire first year of elementary school, and I’ve only made incremental developments in my social skills ever since. In all seriousness, though, I’ve always felt quite embarrassed by how intensely I experience social anxiety. I’ve tried pushing it down and hiding it, and that’s never exactly helped. Wyld Woman has been an opportunity to actually express it and accept it—through legend, of all mediums: the theatre.
Shy Girl feels at once deeply personal and instantly recognizable. How much of her is drawn from your own experiences, and how much is invention or imagined as an alter-ego?
Shy Girl certainly stemmed from my own life, but she’s grown into a sweeter, purer, gentler creature all her own. I started writing to her from a place of shame, and only years later have I realized that I could only dream to be as optimistic and tender and ‘Wyld’ a woman as she is. She’s mythic in her Brontë-sister-level longing for true love, as well as in her passionate attempts at song and dance (slight spoiler alert).
Humor can cut deep 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?
GORGEOUS QUESTION! Pardon me while I weep. Okay, I’m back! 😀
I feel like this has been my life’s very riddle. Ever since I was little, humor has been a way for me to both reveal and conceal myself. But I think, for Shy Girl, it’s not how she hides — it’s just what emerges from her pure and hilarious heart. Humor is ultimately Shy Girl’s loveliest quality. She’s so fixated on how shy and loser-ish and unloved she thinks she is that she doesn’t even notice how epically, powerfully funny she has been all along.
Throughout the performance, you slip between various characters, voices, and perspectives. How did you develop this multi-layered style of storytelling, and what does it allow you to capture about Shy Girl’s inner world?
I’m obsessed with doing 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 cloaked in the impenetrable armor of an eccentric character. At the beginning of the pandemic, I started coming up with these ridiculous characters and recording videos of myself as them. Then I wanted to weave them into a narrative — and what narrative do I know better than a tale of socially awkward late-bloomerhood? That way, I could keep the research light.
The roles these characters play in Shy Girl’s world are inspired by moments from my own life, profoundly exaggerated for dramatic effect: hiding from my roommate by going to bed when the sun is still out; cowering in the face of my scary boss; chasing gynecologists around town to fix my issue of being physically unable to lose my virginity to a man I was in love with (a.k.a. did not feel remotely comfortable with). The personas are all beautifully bizarre because Shy Girl’s take on the world is quite beautifully bizarre.
You also chose to carry it alone onstage. How did you land on the solo format over ensemble, and what helps you sustain the physical and emotional intensity night after night?
I was too shy to ask anyone else to be in it with me! Just kidding—kind of. I was drawn to the form because of my love of character work. It enables me to play with these chameleonic quick changes, which are my favorite things ever. The audience is just about entirely what helps me sustain the intensity of carrying it alone. The audience is the magic elixir that truly brings the show to life. They are Shy Girl’s counsel, and their support keeps her (and me) going.
You worked closely with director Cameron King in shaping the piece. What did that collaboration bring out—whether in tone, structure, or performance—that you might not have discovered on your own?
Cameron is the other magic elixir that has brought the show to life. She and I met at LaGuardia High School in New York City, where we were, respectively, two very cool and very uncool thirteen-year-olds. She has spent the past three years developing the show with me, and all the funniest and most memorable aspects of the show have come from her. She is hilarious and intuitive, and knows how to elevate a seemingly random moment into something utterly iconic. The Blowjob Ballet? All her idea. (If that piques your interest, do come and see the show!)
The show has been described as “a love letter to anyone who’s ever believed they’re not cool enough.” Has performing it felt cathartic for you? And what’s the most memorable response you’ve received from someone who saw themselves in Shy Girl?
Oh my God, it’s been so cathartic. I’ve performed it for strangers, family, friends, crushes, enemies, elders, and those to whom I am an elder. And the audience is heavily involved in the show. Direct eye contact is sustained (how’s that for shy?). It has been so freeing to look all these people in the eye and kind of proclaim, “Yeah, this is who I am,” and be met with so much encouragement and laughter and acceptance.
I have gotten such affirming responses. Someone in Edinburgh messaged me after a show, telling me all about their experiences feeling shy and alone. They ended the message with, “Thank you for today. I cried a few times and felt a great sense of kinship.” That made me cry a few times and feel a great sense of kinship. I think what was so wonderful about Edinburgh was discovering how people of all different demographics related to it—how even a 60-year-old man can have an inner Shy Girl.
And now Shy Girl is traveling—literally. From barns and taco basements to New York, Edinburgh, and now London, how has the piece evolved with each new audience? And what does this Southwark Playhouse debut represent for you?
The earliest iterations of Wyld Woman were at these very unconventional spaces around New York. These set-ups showed us how critical it was to immerse the audience in all of the action (i.e., Shy Girl attempts to lose her virginity on a table full of seated patrons). This was where we honed in on the piece’s juxtaposition—telling a story about this intensely timid lady who is doing all these intensely un-timid things in real time.
Edinburgh was this celestial field of inspiration. It was a chance to witness these magnificent, unique artists and belong to a community—Shy Girl’s deepest wish. But London. Oh, London. No one loves the English like Shy Girl. Her most romantic memory is a scene from My Fair Lady. When she fantasizes about her lackluster American crush, she gives him a British accent. She thinks sex ought to feel like a lustful glance across a Downton Abbey dinner table. It feels like both a miracle and the most undeniable thing in the world to be taking Shy Girl to her dream home.
Shy Girl longs for the classic badges of “cool”—sex, cigarettes, new friends. Were you satirizing those cultural myths, or reflecting your own relationship with them? And has your idea of “cool” shifted over time?
I was definitely more reflecting on my own complicated relationship with them. I was so ashamed of how late-bloomer-y I felt throughout high school and college. I associated having sex and smoking and drinking and drugging (that can be a verb, right?) with capital-C Cool people. It was as though these Cool People had received some sort of manual with instructions on advancing further and further up the ladder of adolescent debauchery. And this manual had somehow missed my doorstep — or I had missed the delivery while inventing relatively chaste love stories in my head, or visiting the orthodontist, or whatever other less-than-cool pastime I was up to back then.
I guess I still have this subconscious desire for people to think I’m more experienced than I am — although my baby-deer-like disposition probably precludes anyone from believing that I was doing Molly at age twelve or had a triple-digit body count by age twenty. But my definition of cool has absolutely shifted over time. I used to think being cool meant being popular in school and smoking cigarettes out of aesthetic necessity. Now I think just about everyone I’ve ever met is pretty cool. I mean, being a human is… like… humiliatingly vulnerable. And we’re all getting up and walking down the street and trying to connect despite that. To me, that’s about as cool as it gets.
For many people with social anxiety, the mind becomes a kind of hidden stage—rehearsed conversations, private rituals, imagined companions. Has that 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 into imaginary worlds; I did so almost compulsively. But when I look back on it now, I realize I would venture inwards at times of heightened loneliness. It’s a true love of a coping mechanism. This deep connection to inner life has made creativity not only my joy, but my sustenance — daily-bread-type energy. (Sorry, that was weird.)
For those who recognize themselves in Shy Girl, what have you learned about turning shyness into a strength? Are there small acts of courage you’d genuinely recommend?
I seriously think shy people are the most precious people in the world. I don’t even have good words to articulate it. It’s just like, “Woah, you are so precious, I love you.” I think that’s my recommendation. If you imagine the shyest part of yourself as a tiny puppy or the cutest four-year-old kid in the entire world and say, “Woah, you are so precious, I love you” — I feel like that would help. Also, write a show about being shy for…
And finally—looking ahead, what kinds of stories or themes are you most eager to explore next?
I’m being drawn toward some sort of story about the search for unconditional love and the divine, and transcending this mortal form. And something about a travelling carnival. Also, perhaps a villain origin story. Clearly, I’m working out some weird stuff in my subconscious.
Book your tickets now at Southwark Playhouse before Shy Girl takes her final bow!
That was our conversation with Isabel Renner on the wit, chaos, and heart behind Wyld Woman: The Legend of Shy Girl. Share your thoughts with us on X/Twitter and Instagram, and discover more exclusive interviews and features over at CelebMix!