When we meet with Lily McMenamy at London Performance Studios, she is in the throes of rehearsals for her one-woman show, A Hole is a Hole. Having first performed an iteration of it in February at Paris’s opulent Bourse de Commerce, McMenamy has decided to rejig the whole show from the bottom up, forming it into something that she can be proud of. As she slinks around the performance space in a full body Lycra suit, which gives cat burglar and Martha Graham in equal measure, there’s a pile of loose pages in the corner of the room. Photocopies of her teenage diary, she tells us.

McMenamy’s surname is too distinctive to hide her heritage, her mother is one of the most famous models of all time, Kristen McMenamy. Whilst Lily did follow her mother into the world of modelling, for the past decade of her life she has felt more at home in the realm of performance. Since discovering the L’École Jacques Lecoq, the renowned physical theatre school in Paris, in her early 20s, McMenamy has become a practitioner of both clown and mime, as well as other forms of physical theatre performance.

A Hole is a Hole is McMenamy’s first major work. An ever-evolving hour of theatre in which she transforms before the audience and places them under her spell. The performance coincides with McMenamy’s new association with London Performance Studios, where she will create new solo work for the space, as well as hosting a series of workshops that build toward a new production in 2025. But for now, McMenamy is ready to prod and provoke her London audiences: “There’s something so satisfying about the bits where I climb into the audience and have this grotesque moment,” she tells us below, “it’s cool to just become this beast.”

Barry Pierce: When did you start working on A Hole is a Hole?
Lily McMenamy: When I was born! No, I’m joking. I’ve just always had a morbid fascination with one-woman shows.

BP: It’s a fun format.
LMcM: And I also feel like, in a wider sense, a pop concert is a one woman show. But for a long time, I don’t know, there’s a lot of clichés that come with performance art or making an autobiographical one-woman show. 

BP: When you think of the one-woman show, your mind tends to go to an older Broadway dame…
LMcM: Do you remember that bit in Friends where she’s like, “Chapter 1… My first period” – that vibe.

BP: Literally that. So, the show is not that!?
LMcM: I’m trying to make it a bit more like that. [laughs] Like, not hide behind too much Disney artifice and juxtapose… the grotesque… with raw emotions…

BP: Oh my god, she’s got the press copy down!
LMcM: [laughs] If you look at the imagery of the costume… I mean, I didn’t think of it as a fanny, but like, it kind of is. Wait, why am I saying this? Oh, because of the period stuff. When we were first making the costume with Monique Fei, we were like, what if it looked like Etsy…feminist… pussy hat, you know what I mean? But she managed to make it look sick. 

BP: When was the first draft of the show?
LMcM: I sort of started making it in lockdown but it didn’t really, like… I always had it in the back of my mind, just waiting for someone to be like, “Babes, here’s your stage.” And then I got the Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection gig. 

BP: Just casually.
LMcM: Yeah, they gave me a date to perform it, so I banged it out quite quickly. 

BP: How was that first performance?
LMcM: Honestly, I wasn’t living for it. I think, as a model, with perfectionist and people-pleasey tendencies, as well as the museum and art context of the location, there was something about it that felt a bit like a spectacle or a still image. I couldn’t really penetrate the crowd. I never intended to do comedy but now I fucking live for it. Not like, stand-up or whatever, but I discovered the art of clown and it’s so sick, how they fuck with the audience, they’ll take your water bottle and pour it on your head but they’ve got you so on their side that you’re like, “Please do it!” So that felt like the antidote to the still image, to really connect with the audience and have the thing be alive in the moment and see what happens. There’s something so satisfying about the bits where I climb into the audience and have this grotesque moment, because I often feel so seen and observed and tested and judged that it’s cool to just become this beast. 

BP: You want to really play with the idea of there being an audience, you want there to be a confrontation.
LMcM: Yeah, someone said to me the other day, if you’re going to just stand there then you might as well just make a film.

“I never intended to do comedy but now I fucking live for it.”

“I’ve just always had a morbid fascination with one-woman shows.”

BP: You’ve still got a couple weeks until the show comes together. How is it looking in its current iteration?
LMcM: Yeah, three weeks until the London show and then a month until the one in Berlin. I’ve brought in some clown and mime advisors…

BP: Hold on a second. Tell me about these… advisors.
LMcM: Well, they’re just sick theatre makers. We’ve had quite a lot of interesting chats about finding the truth of the show and disconnecting the character from the self. They got me writing these interesting things. We discovered the “Ocean of Sadness,” which is now part of the show. This girl I was working with this week was talking a lot about the “Pixar version,” and that really helped. So now I feel like I’ve locked down the “Pixar version” of the show, it feels like I can finally make it. 

“I’ve brought in some clown and mime advisors…”

BP: What should I expect, as an audience member, going into the show?
LMcM: You’re going to be completely reborn. [laughs] I’m exploring a lot. Sometimes I worry it’s, like, everything. I hear this phrase in my head a lot, that I’m “unbecomingly becoming me.” I suppose it’s like a coming-of-age, in a way, and grappling with different parts of yourself. It talks a lot about the experiences I’ve had and I suppose the themes are being perceived, transforming for others versus transforming for yourself, outsourcing your self-worth, what art making is and how the artist and the muse connect. I know people get all cringey about the word muse, but I think it’s a nice word. 

BP: Tell me about mime school.
LMcM: That was a long time ago but honestly it was the best experience of my whole life. And they say that even if you want to be a cheesemonger or a fashion journalist, you should go to mime school because you’ll be the best one. I just went to an evening course because I was twenty and had an inkling that I wanted to be on stage but when I was a kid it was always the popular girls who did drama and I was too shy. Then I did it with my friends in Berlin who had, basically, their own underground theatre and they’d stage plays and it was all sort of mad. I discovered [Jacques] Lecoq and went to the evening class and I became obsessed.

We call it mime school but it’s physical theatre school. So you do clown, grotesque, the language of gesture, which is mime. My thing was bouffon where you fill a bodysuit with all these pieces of foam and I made these massive tits and used to do this character based on all the French girls who used to go to Chez Jeannette and all those bars in Strasbourg-Saint-Denis. But then I went to [École Philippe] Gaulier, which is the clown school. I studied recently with some clowns from Gaulier’s school. I feel there’s this burgeoning clown revolution coming up. 

BP: That’s such a fascinating aspect of theatre that we don’t see much of in London.
LMcM: I guess the Soho Theatre is the main place for it. But I love the looseness, messiness and openness of it. It feels very transgressive to me. It’s the opposite of what my ego, or id, or whatever want to do, which is being this perfect girl giving you this perfect product. 

“I made these massive tits and used to do this character based on all the French girls who used to go to Chez Jeannette…”

BP: You’ve been a model for many years, which is a very “look at me” job. Do you think wanting to play with your audience, to physically get up in their faces, is a reaction to years of just walking down runways and standing still for shoots?
LMcM: Well, obviously, I grew up with modelling first-hand. And I think I saw it as an enchanting power. My mum was married to a fashion photographer and it’s the relationship between the photographer and the model that really fascinates me. Like, what drives a certain kind of guy to want to photograph a woman? And the modelling… Susan Sontag says that to live is to pose, and I suppose it’s an extreme version of that, in a sense. There’s a scene in the show that’s between a photographer and a model and he’s making increasingly absurd demands, like, “retouch your story” and “flatten your senses.” I’m excited for you to see it. 

Lily McMenamy will perform A Hole is a Hole on the 3rd and 4th of September at London Performance Studios, tickets are available here.