Rosalie Minnitt’s highly acclaimed debut show, Clementine, came to the Arena Theatre, Wolverhampton on Saturday, 14th February and was a double Valentine’s Day treat as, later that night, the BBC Radio 4 special Lady Clementine Is Looking For Love was broadcast!
It was Clementine’s first ever Radio 4 outing and adds to the burgeoning career of her creator, Rosalie Minnitt, who recently featured on Loose Ends, appeared in How Are You? It's Alan (Partridge) and won the Funny Women Comedy Short Film Award.
Period spoofs often feel like corsets: restrictive, predictable, and a little suffocating. Rosalie Minnitt’s Clementine, by contrast, is a full-throttle explosion of chaos where historical anachronisms collide with TikTok sounds, obscure pop-culture references, and surreal absurdity, creating something entirely its own.
Described by The Guardian as "Gen Z Jane Austen on Adderall" and the "Fantasia of feminism". It was ranked by The Guardian as amongst the Top 10 comedy shows of 2025 and the Critics Choice 2025 in The Times.
Clementine skewers our obsession with a sanitised, Regency-hued past, using a Gen Z lens to ask whether we have truly escaped the soul-sucking search for ‘The One’, or merely swapped ballrooms for dating apps.
Beneath the laughter pulses a sharp feminist critique: the performative pressures placed on women, past and present, are as absurd as they are relentless.
Originally debuting in 2022 and gaining traction at the 2023 Edinburgh Fringe, this current tour sees Clementine reworked with even more chaos. We meet Lady Clementine Chessington-World-of-Adventures on the eve of her 27th birthday, with one night to find a husband or face the asylum.
Set roughly "in the past" this is a story about sickly sisters, self love and Sylvanian Families and ranked by The Telegraph as the Funniest Show in 2024.
Historical accuracy is gleefully abandoned in favour of a playful, absurdist universe where anything can happen. From the first line of the performance at the Arena Theatre in Wolverhampton the audience was roaring; laughter punctuated nearly every gag, a testament to Minnitt’s infectious energy as a writer and performer.
Minnitt’s brilliance lies in taking a character who could easily be insufferable – stroppy, conceited, delusional – and making her utterly irresistible. Her improvisational dexterity shines when she plucks an audience member to play her hapless suitor.
Adorned with a powdered wig and scout sash, her volunteer (victim?) gamely absorbed an extraordinary amount of stage time, much to the delight of the crowd.
Clementine’s comedy is as much in the ad-lib as in the script itself.
Intelligent silliness drives the show. Projected images of Suffragettes and period-drama clips clash brilliantly with viral TikTok sounds.
Humour oscillates between the calculated and cultured to the downright absurd: Clementine’s 67 sisters turn out to be Sylvanian Families characters; the Titanic sinks… in the 1700s. Not every gag lands perfectly, but the show’s inventiveness keeps the audience laughing throughout.
At its heart, Clementine is a feminist manifesto disguised as chaos. Minnitt skewers patriarchal norms with precision, showing how historical pressures – marriage, propriety and the quest for a suitable husband – have morphed into modern pressures – dating apps, Instagram aesthetics and performative selfhood.
Amid the absurdity, self-love emerges as the ultimate triumph. Hilarious, chaotic, and genuinely heart-warming, Clementine is a riotous, incisive reminder that comedy can be socially sharp, emotionally astute and utterly entertaining all at once.
