In an early piece, Bobby Baker made a life-size family out of cake and invited the audience to eat it. In How to Live she gives us all a pea, and asks us to swallow. It is not until you have obeyed that you realise you have swallowed Baker herself: the humble pea represents the small, insignificant patient Baker was when she sought cognitive therapy for a personality disorder. I haven't felt quite so guilty since raging thirst led me to drink a bottle of holy water on the coach on the way back from a school trip to Aylesford.
Besides acts of cannibalism and the opportunity to ponder why theatre producers have previously overlooked the star quality of the garden pea, How to Live offers recipes for life. Baker - whose credentials include "55 years and 10 months' experience of living"- transforms herself into a slightly bumbling mental health guru who is introducing an 11-step programme - "a cognitive therapy designed to save the world". "It is," she informs us, "for all of you," before adding a little sinisterly, "whether you think you need it or not."
The entire evening is perched somewhere between the silly and the serious, the cosy and the creepy. You don't always quite know where you are, though some of the advice seems sound: "Undo your rage by acting sweet." I shall remember that in all my future dealings with PC World and British Gas.
There have been too many of these guru-type spoofs for the show to seem wholly original, and Baker too often gets by on "the indefinable power of delighting", as she puts it. But the piece works because Baker brings her whole self to it, laying out the domestic canvas of her life with an unselfconscious vulnerability. And because it boasts a pea-centred, all-singing, all-dancing finale so pleasurable that it makes you feel as if you have spent the previous 75 minutes relaxing in a puddle of warm butter.
· Until Saturday. Box office: 0845 120 7550. Then touring.
