Ciarlene Coleman on ‘Your Favourite American Woman’ at Canal Café Theatre
After the success of our 2025 Camden Fringe Interviews, we thought it only right to attempt a repeat for 2026. So throughout July we’ll be publishing new interviews each day to give a taste of what to expect from London’s best fringe theatre festival. The festival starts Monday 3 August this year, so we may give ourselves a couple of days off inbetween the end of the interviews and the first shows… then again, we might not.
You can find out more about Camden Fringe, along with details of every show playing this August here. You can also find all of this year’s interviews as they are published here.
What happens when you mix high-energy cabaret aesthetics with post-colonial critical theory and a personal crisis? You get Your Favourite American Woman, a razor-sharp, 50-minute dark comedy heading to the iconic Canal Café Theatre for Camden Fringe 2026.
Written and performed by Ciarlene Coleman and produced by Off the Beat Productions, the show dives headfirst into “Wasian” (White/Asian) discourse, Orientalism in Western media, and the complex psychological weight of migration. Modeled as an interactive college seminar led by an expert named “C,” the performance unravels as the line between academic analysis and raw personal breakdown completely dissolves.
We sat down with Ciarlene to talk about reworking the script across continents, navigating the boundary between fiction and real life, and how an all-migrant creative team turned personal pain into cabaret art.
If you had to describe the vibe of your show in just one sentence, what would it be?
Our show is what happens when an American showgirl reads Edward Said.
In the midst of “Wasian” (“white and asian”) discourse, expert on Orientalism in Western media C breaks it all down (and breaks down, too).
Is this version how you originally envisioned it or has it changed drastically since you first put pen to paper?
This show has changed immensely since our first iteration. We brought our premiere version to last year’s Lambeth Fringe, and we had a positive response after one performance, but we all felt we could have used more time to make the show even stronger. After about six months of rewriting, development, and global correspondence (we are all from outside the UK, and we had lots of travel this year, including for my wedding!), we finally have something fresh and more “cooked” for Camden Fringe this year compared to last year’s version.
How challenging has this role been for you?
This role has been bouncing between extremes of “totally comfortable” to “probably the most uncomfortable I could be,” since C (the main character of Your Favourite American Woman) was created as a further fictionalized version of myself.
My original idea, scraps of text and music came from a 100% personal place, reflecting real challenges in my life. This created authenticity in my performance, but that got challenging when I realised I’d scripted myself to face some actual, real-life demons, on stage. As the actor, it felt important for me to write a boundary between C and myself in order to sustainably and effectively share the thematic arcs of this story with audiences.
We also all felt that the story being told in YFAW would benefit from a central character’s perspective, allowing audiences directly into the emotional point of view of experiencing what she (and I) experiences. Funnily, making the main character more fictional helped me get more comfortable telling the very real story itself.
What is the “secret sauce” that makes your ensemble dynamic work?
Our team, which is made up of myself (writer/performer), our director, and our AD/choreographer, is completely comprised of migrant women who have decided to pursue our art and our activism here in London, in the UK. Because this show is all about global migration, I feel that our collective understanding of the stakes of immigration deepens our connection to it, especially in this current political climate.
How important is audience interaction to you?
Oh, SO important! Our show is modeled after college classes, after all. C is the teacher and the audience is the class, and she won’t be afraid of leading group discussion.
Additionally, our show pays homage to the aesthetics of cabaret, and our venue is a true-to-form cabaret space, with everything from tabled seating to rich, red curtains. We want our show to feel up close and personal, because it’s all about C’s relationship to audiences, and audiences’ relationship to C (and other Asian women in the West).
If you had to describe your show as a colour?
Brown, brown, brown. Brown leather books, rich brown skin, brown wooden tables to read on. (With pops of tropical, verdant green.)
If your show was a drink at the venue bar, what would be the ingredients?
Not a cocktail, but I’d say an ube frappe from Costa or something. Kinda Filipino, kinda Western, but unlike anything you’ve had before (probably).
What’s the most valuable piece of advice you’ve received during your career, and how has it influenced your work on this show?
A friend and mentor from grad school once advised me to “alchemize” my pain into something beautiful, and this show is the result of me alchemizing the past couple years of all my feelings into a 50-minute fringe show, into something I find beautiful.
Many thanks to Ciarlene for the chat. Your Favourite American Woman will play at Canal Cafe Theatre from Tuesday 11 to Saturday 16 August.
