Godot Is a Woman will have you laughing all evening and arguing all night

Godot Is a Woman opens with three tramps standing on a bare stage beneath a solitary upright. This isn’t Samuel Beckett’s famous drama about a pair of vagrants, Vladimir and Estragon, who wait in vain for a mysterious visitor. This is a spoof in which a trio of actors (two female, one non-binary) seek a licence to perform the script that Beckett insisted must be played by male actors only. The upright prop is a telephone box and the thesps are trying to get through to the Beckett estate. They’re answered by a robotic female voice. ‘You are 9,124th in the call queue.’ A burst of inane lift music fills the air and the actors pass the time by performing a comic dance routine that lasts 15 minutes.

This is a high-risk strategy because a funny dance is always in danger of becoming tedious or repetitive. And the key joke, namely that the call queue and the time-wasting dance are a parody of the play itself, isn’t a particular strong idea. But these performers are exceptional. Josie Underwood, Jack Wakely and Cara Withers work like a single comic organism and their on-stage antics have a tremendous sense of fun, sweetness and mischief. The laughs are never forced but seem to emerge out of thin air. And although they’ve rehearsed their moves meticulously, they manage to pretend that they’re inventing the whole thing on the hoof.

From here, the show evolves into a series of sketches about various overlooked aspects of Beckett’s play. The tramps have carrots in their pockets, like Vladimir and Estragon, but they also carry peelers and they insist on skinning the vegetables before they eat them. Two lecturers appear, Dr Whimple and Dr Whomple, who deliver a comic talk about the prostate difficulties from which Vladimir allegedly suffers.