‘Could Diana be a verb?’

Not long ago, I jumped onto the one-person show bandwagon. To date, this has included Metamorphosis (Lyric Theatre London), Effie in Splott (Lyric Hammersmith Theatre), Reasons Why You Shouldn't Love Me (Kiln Theatre), I'm Sorry I'm Not Lucy Liu (Camden People's Theatre) and Will Young's Song From Far Away (Hampstead Theatre). My most recent is Peter Smith's DIANA.

I hadn't heard of Peter Smith, an American-born, non-binary comedian and performer before this show; I only booked as I couldn't pass up the opportunity to see a show based on the life of everyone's favourite Princess. Peter doesn't just regurgitate what we already know though. They delve into the repercussions that the traumas of long ago still have on women and society as a whole.

I was particularly intrigued by how Peter managed to captivate the entire auditorium for 90 minutes in both monologue and original song, all the while addressing such difficult and important themes. That can't have been easy, with a child sitting in the front row!

I asked them about putting the show together, from conception to delivery. 

Tell us about your professional and personal background, and what you currently do.

I'm an artist based in New York City. I hail from the American Midwest and I came to NYC to work for the artist George Condo. I've done art direction work for Kanye West, cabaret and burlesque performance, been on television in various capacities and recently was on Broadway in Macbeth. Currently I'm in London performing a solo piece called Peter Smith's DIANA, studying the vagus nerve, and working on new music.

What inspired you to do this show?

I'm inspired by many things about Diana. About five years ago I realised I had never heard her speak, but was all too familiar with her outfits, scandals, the blue eyeliner. I find that any famous blonde woman's widespread surface level iconography is always a convenient distraction tool from a man's abuse of power. I watched her BBC interview which has her speaking from a place of power – post analysis, post self-help books, clear-eyed and level-headed. I want to challenge what a famous woman's legacy could be, besides fodder for fashion mood boards. Could her name be a verb? Could 'Diana' mean 'to acknowledge the struggles experienced by the majority of people' or 'to do what you can within the oppressive system to fight against further oppression' or 'to display vulnerability in a way that helps others' or 'to show unconditional love to humanity'?

The show is multi-faceted, covering such difficult themes in both original song and witty monologue so eloquently in such a short timeframe. The comedic effect is so on point! 

Thank you! The subject matter is very heavy, so moments of levity are crucial for people to stomach it. The themes are predominantly wrapped around loneliness, the psychological/physical effects of living in the 24-hour news cycle, and acknowledging the state of women's suffering.

I feel Diana's body was a human sacrifice for the horrible media machine that we all suffer from today, physically and mentally. The show's writing is inspired by what it feels like to scroll through social media on your phone throughout the day. The seemingly chaotic order of content is actually a meticulous presentation built by an enigmatic 'Algorithm'. Our brains are inundated with media in a maddening turnstile of emotionally vulnerable captioned selfies, sandwiched between various global catastrophes, followed by a call for 'self-care', followed by a horrific statistic, followed by an estranged friend's wedding announcement, and so on and so on. At the end of the day we have taken in so much information yet have no way to handle or remember most of it, leaving us with a vague feeling of general worldwide suffering. Humans have never been more connected and yet people have never felt more alone. We have been guinea pigs for how this false sense of social connection alters our 'selves'. This parallels Diana's deep loneliness despite being connected and known to everyone on the planet.

Do you have other memories of Diana?

My initial interaction with Diana was my mother's sadness on the day the Princess died. That collective grief, among women especially, is something that fascinates me, as well as the trauma on a generation of children seeing their mother experience sadness. Dr Edward Tronick's Still Face experiment in the 70s showed how infants are greatly impacted by their parents' downtrodden 'still face'… and that's the exact same face we have when we look at our phones, meaning we are all triggering each other's emotional subconscious whenever someone sees us look down at our phone. There is a cancer attacking social life which has us watching it die and grieving its loss at the same time.

Speaking from my experience living in western culture, grief is often a private, isolated experience with no road map. Western Culture treats death as a failure because the end of life means you stop being a tool for production and according to western culture… not producing anything constitutes death. This gets supported when celebrities die 'too soon'. 'Too soon'… before they could accomplish something great, leaving us to fear our own mortality and fear never reaching maximum labour potential.

The show has got such mixed reviews. What challenges did you face and overcome bringing the script to life and whilst performing the show itself?

Everyone is welcome to enjoy or not enjoy my work, but this show specifically speaks to women and queer people. Most of the reviews were done by men who actively did not take into account the intended audience. Some misgendered me, which speaks more about their work than mine. How these UK publications report on trans topics, in general, is pretty horrific… so there is a much larger issue that I must call out. Mainstream media used Diana to sell papers and now mainstream media is using trans people to get views and clicks. I am lucky to receive nightly messages from audience members that love it and feel seen, as well as in person conversations post show. That's why I do what I do. I am very grateful to see the audience's faces and the smiles, laughs and gasps. Performing alone on stage can be isolating and exhausting, but connecting with audiences afterwards has been such a buoy.

The show ends on 29 July. Do you have any plans on what to do next? After a much-needed holiday of course!

I am working on new writing, joining the SAG-AFTRA Strike on the picket lines at home in NYC and furthering my study of the vagus nerve so that I may spread that knowledge for people looking to soothe their nervous system.

• Find out more. Photo: Harry Elletson.