Review of Charis King's one-woman play at the Women In Comedy festival

The central character in writer-performer Charis King’s one-woman play is a wannabe yummy mummy – hence the portmanteau title. At 31, she’s a struggling teacher in a shared flat in a dull part of London, with a nice but boring and unambitious – and, most importantly, equally broke – boyfriend back in Dorset. Yet she dreams of the glossy-magazine, Instagram-perfect lifestyle: Chelsea townhouse, married to a banker with generational wealth, perfect children, a live-in nanny and housekeeper, and all the rest. She listens to a manifestation podcast that every day tells her how she can achieve this simply by envisaging it. Of course that’s impossible and she has to take direct action if she wants to stop just dreaming of this alternative existence. 

Thus she signs up for a sort of gym that makes you sweat when you see the monthly fees, and engineers it to hang out with the loaded ladies who frequent it,  hoping to plug into their social circle while running up bills she cannot afford on all the designer-label accoutrements of wealth.

Wummy is very straightforward about its satire on the gap between the aspirations peddled by the media – both new and old – and most people’s real lives, and what would genuinely make them happy. There’s no need to read between the lines while the well-to-do characters are all stereotypes – though, to be fair, many of them are in the real world, too. With our central character relentlessly shallow and the people she wants to emulate as awful as they are vacuous, there’s no one here to really root for. 

But the show is rescued by a strong performance, especially as our anti-heroine descends into an increasingly desperate, lipstick-smeared grotesque. King is thoroughly committed and plays the clowning and physical elements particularly well.

There are some fun bits of audience interaction and King brings to life some other characters too, such as her alter-ego's Eastern European flatmate, forever leaving his takeouts on the floor, and rugger-bugger finance guy Charles, her prospective husband.

Such elements all ensure a fun hour, even if more ingenuity in the story and the characters wouldn’t go amiss.

Review date: 5 Oct 2026
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Manchester The Fitzgerald