“I really am like so addicted to that feeling now. Like so addicted to that feeling now… I would do anything for that laugh. But I also have to constantly remind myself of like, what are the costs of that? What are the sacrifices you have to make? At the moment, I’m running from month to month and hoping that things fall in place.”
If Rosalie Minnitt is tired, you certainly wouldn’t know it. There is zero hint of fatigue in the bright, enthusiastic tones that characterise our conversation; instead, she vibrates with the specific, frenetic energy of a comedian who has stumbled upon something genuine. We are speaking as she prepares to take Clementine—her “deranged and irreverent” period drama parody—back on the road for a 2026 UK tour.
It is a show that has evolved from a COVID-era fever dream into a bona fide cult hit, surviving two Edinburgh Fringes and four Soho Theatre residencies. That is to say, the jury is decidedly in on the quality of this particular Regency romp.
Yet, listening to Minnitt, it becomes clear that even the euphoria of a sold-out run cannot entirely mask the immense pressures of being a creator-performer in 2026. The reality of the independent artist is less about champagne corks and more about vocal steamers, train delays, and the endless calling in of favours. It is a life lived in the margins of the “real” economy, fuelled by a compulsion that borders on the pathological.
“I think part of the reason I wanted to do another tour with the show stems from the one in 2025 – I had applied for funding and didn’t get it,” she admits, with a candour that is refreshing in an industry prone to bluffing. “So I ended up just doing the dates I could afford to do, and like could sort of cobble together with like favours and help… every single different date had like a different combination of very lovely people that helped me get there.”
“I really am like so addicted to that feeling now. Like so addicted to that feeling now… I would do anything for that laugh. But I also have to constantly remind myself of like, what are the costs of that?”
Rosalie Minnnit
It’s a familiar story, frankly, for anyone navigating the UK arts scene in the mid-2020s, where funding is more myth than reality and resilience is the only currency in town. But for Minnitt, the struggle seems inseparable from the art. The chaotic, precarious existence of the touring comic feeds directly into the frantic energy of her alter ego.
Manifesting The Madness
It is a hustle that has paid off, largely because Clementine arrives at a moment when the cultural zeitgeist has caught up with Minnitt’s obsession. With the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth looming and Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights generating headlines, “period drama core” is having a moment.
But Minnitt’s creation isn’t a polite, tea-sipping nod to the Regency; it is a “kaleidoscopic concoction” of historical anachronism and “chronically online” anxiety. It’s Bridgerton for the doom-scrolling generation.
“I think I had a new sort of found appreciation for so much of… the context in which so many of these particularly like women wrote in that period,” Minnitt reflects on her recent dive into Austen documentaries. “I think I’ve never really appreciated how out on a limb they had to go to make their stuff, get their stuff out there.”
Squint and you’ll see the parallel here, of course. Just as the Brontës and Austens fought against the suffocating constraints of their gender and era, Minnitt is fighting the thoroughly modern constraints of the gig economy. The character of Lady Clementine—a woman with until her 27th birthday to find ‘The One’—began as a vessel for Minnitt’s own pandemic-induced madness.
“This character kind of emerged during COVID when I think we were all going a bit mad,” she says. “What I liked about it was that… you could sort of live in these kind of like fantasy fictional period drama worlds and make jokes about like history and literature whilst also kind of commenting on stuff in the modern day.”
It wasn’t an instant success, however. In true “fake it ’til you make it” style, Minnitt simply refused to let the idea die. “I sort of was like, ‘There has to be something in this because I want to do it,'” she says, describing a process of sheer brute-force creativity. “I kind of just hammered on with this character regardless of whether it worked or not and then did it until it did.”
The Mask of Truth
This “hammering on” has resulted in a performance that feels less like acting and more like an anarchic seance. For Minnitt, the corset isn’t a costume; it’s a release valve.
“I think a lot of often people will like accuse people of hiding behind a character,” she muses, tackling the age-old stigma attached to character comedy. “I disagree because I think it’s more of another form of expression rather than like a mask. And it feels like you can do and say things that you can’t do in your real life.”
In this sense, Clementine is a psychological gym. “If I’m stressed about something, and I do a really, like I do a gig as the character, I’ll feel as though I’m going to the gym. Like you’ve sort of got rid of something, and it feels really cathartic ’cause it doesn’t really feel like me.”
This catharsis is palpable in the room. Audiences aren’t just watching a parody; they are watching a woman unravel in real-time, channeling the collective neuroses of a generation that feels simultaneously trapped by tradition and paralyzed by modernity.
Chaos on the Road
The show itself is a living organism, a “patchwork” of Minnitt’s development as a performer. She describes the strange sensation of performing a role that contains the “fossilised” remains of her younger, less experienced self.
“You can kind of see me learning throughout it,” she explains. “It kind of like this really nice patchwork of me trying to learn how to write and do comedy. And I think because of that, the show is then constantly changing as I am.”
This constant evolution can be a headscratcher for the technical crew. Minnitt recounts a moment with a particularly beleaguered technician: “The guy who was the tech was like, ‘Do you just do this? Like everytime—you just keep on changing it?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, I’ve never done the same show twice. Like it’s always changing.’ And he was like, ‘That’s so stressful.’ He couldn’t believe that we were still writing it.”
But this fluidity is essential, particularly when touring outside the polite confines of the London theatre scene. On the road, Clementine often morphs into something wilder, feeding off the specific energy of regional crowds.
“I had to kind of break apart the show a lot more because people needed to be invited into the world a lot more,” she says. “There were a lot of shows on that tour where audiences were just very vocal, and it was really funny and it was kind of like there were sort of like pantomime-esque energies to it.”
She recalls one night in Leeds where the fourth wall didn’t just break; it shattered. “This woman was like really, really vocal, and she really was like wanted to be massively involved, and she sort of ended up becoming like quite a key part of the show… My friend was like, ‘You just kind of completely changed this show for the woman.’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, but I had to.'”
Bursting the Bubble
This ability to adapt—to let a Leeds punter dictate the flow of her Regency parody—speaks to the show’s surprisingly broad appeal. While Clementine is pitched as “Bridgerton for chronically online girlies,” it has found a home far beyond the usual suspects.
“You get a sort of sense of being like trapped in the Soho bubble a little bit where like you kind of are just performing to other performers,” Minnitt says of the London circuit. “And it was really nice that that wasn’t the case with the show, and that there was like real people…these were new audiences for us. Not just like where they were, but who.”
It is a vindication of Minnitt’s faith in the “word of mouth” power of live performance, even in an algorithm-dominated age. Real people, it turns out, still want to sit in a dark room and watch a woman in a dress lose her mind.
Clementine: On The Road (Selected Dates)
Rosalie Minnitt’s tour is currently winding its way across the UK, stopping at venues that appreciate a bit of bodice-ripping chaos. For a full itinerary and tickets, visit: https://linktr.ee/rosalieminnitt
- 14 Feb: Arena Theatre, Wolverhampton – A Valentine’s Day treat for the cynicism-inclined.
- 14 Mar: East Riding Theatre, Beverley
- 17 & 18 Apr: Buxton Crescent Heritage Trust – A particularly apt setting; one imagines Austen herself might have taken the waters here.
- 15 & 16 May: Birmingham Rep
- 7 Jun: Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff
Bringing the Weird Back
That evolution is now entering new territory: the transition to audio. Minnitt is currently adapting Clementine for a BBC Radio 4 pilot, a process she describes as “tricky.” Without the visual cues—the corsets, the frantic movement—the absurdity of the writing has to stand on its own.
“I think writing absurd jokes as a woman is quite difficult because I think people just think that you’re losing your mind,” she notes wryly. “Whereas I think if like a boy writes weird stuff, they like think that, well it’s probably going to be genius… Whereas I think like in my context, it’s been a bit like, ‘I think she’s just not got a grip on reality’.”
“I think writing absurd jokes as a woman is quite difficult because I think people just think that you’re losing your mind…”
It is this commitment to “the weird” that Minnitt is desperate to reclaim. She cites Julio Torres’s 2018 Fringe show—an hour of giving personalities to shapes—as a pivotal inspiration. “I was like, ‘God this guy’s weird. I love it.’… I think the show has become less weird the more I’ve toured it, so I’m trying to bring the weird back in.”
As for the future? Minnitt is ready to stop being a one-woman army. After years of shouldering the burden of the solo show, she is looking for collaborators, for people to share the “creative load.” Maybe the loneliness of the long-distance comedian is losing its charm, but mostly she seems eager to see what happens when she isn’t the only one responsible for the ideas in the rehearsal room.
But for now, the tour rolls on. And even if Rosalie Minnitt is running on fumes as she hauls Clementine’s corsets to every corner of the nation, there is still plenty of hope in the tank. It is the specific, slightly illogical hope that defines the modern artist; a hope born not just of necessity, but of the singular, addictive ecstasy of a stranger’s laughter.
“Hope”, she says,” keeps us going.”
Featured Image: Rosalie Minnitt as Clementine – close up, uncredited
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