There are so many marvellous things you can do with an Aga. Comedy duo Lip Service live in theirs. Popping in and out of the oven in a bewildering number of guises, including a spectacular Astaire-and Rogers routine on the hotplates, Maggie Fox and Sue Ryding extract the full range from a range full of comic surprises.
Lip Service are the Laurel and Hardy of literary deconstruction. The Brontë heritage industry has scarcely recovered from the duo's Withering Looks. Road Movie, still their finest hour, rattled along on the sheer absurdity of Thelma and Louise cast as two middle-aged Mancunians with a mis-matched physical presence.
Perhaps the only problem with their new show, Women on the Verger, is that, in picking on the Joanna Trollopian stereotype of vicarious passion in a country vicarage, they have finally found a form of fiction that is beyond parody. Not that Lip Service's considerable fan-base care. They are already rolling in the aisles at the opening sequence: a bravura exhibition of quick changes in which Fox (or is it Ryding? It's difficult to tell) populates an entire parish.
Predominately women of a certain age, and precisely the sort who might have Lip Service's hit list on their library ticket, Fox and Ryding's audience, one senses, are being sent up as much as anything else. None the less, Lip Service's spoof-on-a-shoestring never flags, and the show is a farrago of sight gags, sound effects and funny facial expressions, the impact of which rather transcends the script.
"I still think Road Movie was their best," mutters one chap during the interval, and it is hard to disagree. Still, there are plenty of literary categories to rifle through before the joke wears thin. Normal Lip Service will be resumed shortly.
At the Theatre Royal (01904 623568) tonight and the Palace Theatre, Watford, (01923 225671), tomorrow.
