A Haslemere resident got in touch with This is Haslemere to tell us about a comedian who has recently brought her show – LOVE HUNT - to Soho Theatre in London. This show was winner of best Comedy at Adelaide Fringe 2026, shortlisted for Best Newcomer at Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2025 and shortlisted for Best New Show Brighton Fringe 2025.

The comedian is Charlie Mulliner and she grew up in Haslemere. We decided to make contact with her to hear how she got into comedy and learn about her journey as she starts to make a name for herself writing and performing her own shows. We had a brilliant conversation and this is definitely the most we have laughed writing one of our features.

Charlie was born in Weydown Road and attended St Ives Junior School in Three Gates Lane. After that, she went to boarding school but always came back to Haslemere. She was a member of The Haslemere Thespians Next Generation taking part in plays in Haslemere Hall. She recalls being in a production of The Tempest which was “heavy stuff for one so young” where they split the character of Ariel into four with girls at different ages. She remembered that one of the days, one of their Aerials got sick, so she filled in and got to be two parts of Ariel. She loved that. Another musical Charlie remembered that Haslemere Thespians put on was Skool and Crossbones but she can’t for the life of her remember the plot! She also did ballet at what was then called the Denise Cantan School of Dancing (now Haslemere Performing Arts). Charlie performed many times at The Godalming Festival and, recently, whilst going through a box of stuff at her parents’ home, she found festival certificates she’d not seen for years: Under-6 Bible Reading, Under-8 Poetry Reading, Under-11 Duologue.

Charlie worked at the White Horse Pub in the High Street when she turned 18. She reminisced, “I think it's kind of always been the best pub in town. After our evening shift, when The White Horse closed, we’d all cross over the road to The Swan which had later closing hours until midnight. So, we’d all have a post-work drink there to round the night off before I staggered back up the hill to home.”

After A-Levels, Charlie was thinking she could either be an actor or go into the foreign office. With her parents’ encouragement, she opted for university with their logic that she would always have something to fall back on. At Oxford University, she read Theology. Her college didn’t really do a Drama degree but there was so much drama there. It was all extracurricular with a lot of money pumped into lots of different plays. There was a website which made you feel like a professional actor where you'd run your finger down an audition board and you could go to 10 auditions a week. There were so many plays going on.

By the time Charlie left university, she’d been in 12 different productions. In the Summer, they went up to The Edinburgh Fringe. She said, “It was a really good training ground in a way.” Then she laughed a gorgeous laugh and said, “We all just about managed to get our work done.”

Post-uni, Charlie took a year out to save money to fund drama school. And then went to the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama to do an MA. She subsequently studied in Paris at both École Philippe Gaulier and École Jacques Lecoq.

We talked about whether Charlie considered if she had always been funny. As the youngest of four she said she was definitely annoying and always a little pipsqueak in her siblings’ eyes. A friend she has known since she was four recently told her she was always funny but Charlie wondered if people were laughing at her and just suffered her. And she let out that gorgeous laugh again.

Then Charlie got very serious about being funny saying, “I've always had lots of energy and lots of enthusiasm. I don't know when I started considering myself as being funny. I still don't know if I really would. I think I'm an idiot and I make mistakes, mistakes with a lot of noise and so I have to laugh at them. I used to think that being witty was the only way of being funny but you can be funny in lots of ways and probably my way of being funny is just by being a bit of an idiot. I think if you laugh at yourself, it makes it a lot easier for other people to laugh at you too. Some standup comedians are very clever and they get people to laugh because they've been so surprising in their thoughts. And I think other comedians recognise the humanity and the silliness of the absurdity of that person, and they recognise it somewhere in themselves and that makes them laugh. I think that’s a slightly warmer laugh which I really like. My comedy is all about characters and there’s always a story.”

In Charlie’s current play, LOVE HUNT, there is a deeply sexually repressed nun who goes around wanting everyone's confessions, hoping to hear their most sordid ones. Secretly, she quite enjoys hearing them because she never got to have any of those experiences herself. It is quite silly. Charlie is very excited to have put on this show at The Soho Theatre in June 2026 which is known as the theatre for alternative comedy. She is going to take the show to Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2026 for another week in the Summer to one of the Pleasance Theatres.

What is next for Charlie? She is working on a new show called RIP. It is all about a little old man called Willie who is approaching death and trying to work out if he feels like he has lived a good life or not. She laughed and said, “So really, really light! But, it is comedy. It's a kind of a meditation on what it is that we focus on. How the stories that we tell ourselves affect the way we live our life and the way we feel about our life. I currently feel that there's a lot of emphasis on achievement and money. So, we often tell ourselves stories of how we've been failures because we haven't achieved this. It’s an optimistic message that we’ve all got things in our lives that we can appreciate, we just have to know how to appreciate them. Willie has a story that he's been a bit of a boring man, and actually, hopefully over the course of the show, he realises that he's done lots of beautiful things and had lots of beautiful experiences and relationships.” For this show, Charlie has received Arts Council funding. The plan is to take the show to Australia in December 2026.

Never mind Australia, we asked Charlie if she’d ever bring one of her shows to Haslemere. She beamed with pure delight and said she’d love to put on a show at Haslemere Hall. Watch this space…

Check out Charlie Mulliner’s website

Listen to Comedy In a Nutshell Podcast with Charlie 

Follow Charlie Mullier on Instagram