Kate: a slick, one-woman skewering of one-woman shows

“IGNORE ME”, says the placard on Kate Berlant’s lap. This is difficult. She’s spotlit, for one thing. And she’s sitting right outside her own theatre. One must walk past her to get in, having first climbed two flights of stairs decorated with a dozen life-size cutouts of the LA comedian and about 50 framed photos of her face.

It’s one of the great comedy faces: Berlant’s eyebrows could be used for semaphore. A living cartoon, the 36-year-old can twist a smile into shapes no smile has hitherto been. And you’ll have plenty of time to contemplate her face: it fills a giant screen upstage, in moody black-and-white, for a comically overlong pre-show presentation. Up flash mugshots of the great Method-acting masters: Meisner, Adler, and now… Kate Berlant.

So, long before you see Kate, you’ve already seen Kate. But this show is funniest if you’ve already seen a “Kate” – a confessional one-woman show of the kind Berlant is dissecting, in this arch, hip parody of theatrical vanity-projects.

Londoners might feel they’ve seen a “Kate” for another reason, though: the Soho Theatre’s last big hit, Liz Kingsman’s One Woman Show, was a spoof cut from similar cloth, hitting many of the same beats (with, it must be said, a much higher gag-rate). In both, the protagonist gushes about the “magic of theatre”, before admitting they’re only doing this show to land a TV deal. The laughs in Kingsman’s show were mostly in the writing; those in Berlant’s are mostly in the performance, the key joke being its insincerity – that cod-stage-school solemnity she gives to lines such as “a star shines brightest in the dark”.

Kate is, supposedly, the story of Berlant’s lifelong love affair with the camera: would she dare to pursue her dream of stardom, defying her harridan of a mother? (Ma Berlant is given an atrocious Irish accent. “My mother’s not Irish,” she deadpans. “But I’m playing with a certain emotional register here that only an Irish accent can give you.”) Will she unlock her buried trauma, and learn to cry on screen?

A hit off-Broadway, Kate is directed by Bo Burnham, playing his usual slippery games with sincerity, technology and chilly artifice. Whenever Berlant mugs at an onstage camera, another Berlant does the same on-screen, slightly out of sync, raising doubts over whether it’s a live-feed or a recording.

What makes Berlant’s usual stand-up work so exciting is its fizzing spontaneity – her semi-improvised, stream-of-consciousness riffing with the crowd. In Kate, she has constructed a slick star vehicle that allows no space for that; it’s a pin-sharp pastiche of something lifeless. Much as I admired it, I missed the fizz.

Until Sept 30; sohotheatre.com