Very Little Women, Lip Service, York Theatre Royal, October 12 to 16

Maggie Fox, the tall one, and Sue Ryding, the not so tall one, have sharpened their satirical scalpel once more, taking their skills of literary deconstruction to Louisa May Alcott's body of work. Little Women will be never the same again when Lip Service send up the March girls, sensible Meg, tomboy and would-be novelist Jo, consumptive Beth and vain, silly Amy. Charles Hutchinson goes Fox hunting.

What has Louisa May Alcott done to warrant a visit from the Lip Service hit squad?

"I can't remember ever reading Little Women as a child but Sue did, and she wept buckets. She said we must do it some time, so I had to read it, and she was absolutely right: we just had to do it. It's so sanctimonious, so twee...just awful...and they're Americans."

Americans? One thinks of Lip Service as so quintessentially English...

"It's marvellous playing these Americans who are being really rather horrid to each other but in such a twee way.

"We've not done any American accents before, and as Little Women is set in Massachusetts in the American Civil War, we got in a dialect coach, Terry Besson, to assist us. He came in halfway through rehearsals, which could have been tricky, but he thought we were doing rather well, which is always reassuring. And we have an American in our stage crew which keeps us on our toes."

Your partner in satire, Sue Ryding, is not alone in retaining a deep affection for the literary works of Louisa May Alcott. Have you upset anyone on the tour?

"No, it seems to be going down rather well. Alcott fans are seeing this book in a whole new light! In fact one woman said that when Woman's Hour on BBC Radio 4 did a serialisation of Little Women shortly after she saw our show, she found it rather difficult not to think of our expressions as she listened."

Your teasing is done with affection, isn't it?

"Affection, and also respect for Alcott. She was one of the first woman writers to write about her own life and she was able to make a living out of writing. She was incredibly successful in her own lifetime."

You are joined for the second time in a Lip Service production by a man playing a woman. Is Matthew Vaughan a glutton for punishment?

"We had Matthew in The Importance Of Being Earnest playing Gwendolyn, a role in which he had to be sick into a handbag rather too often. This time he's playing Marmee, the mother, and he didn't mind at all. He seemed to be fully expecting to be asked when we rang him."

What marked out Matthew as an actor who could slip into the Lip Service house style?

"Insanity was one of the main things that helped him to get the job. He has that fearless quality to just go for it. He was in Sains-bury's the other day when two ladies who had just been to a matinee came up and said 'You're in that show, aren't you? You're all as daft as brushes'... which we are."

Who will be your next victim?

"Ah, yes. York Theatre Royal has already booked it. It's going to be about horror and people who can't quite cope with watching a horror movie, watching from behind the sofa. People like me! We've got several titles fighting it out: Horror For Wimps, Don't Look Now, View From Behind The Sofa."

How is the show progressing?

"It's going to have film sequences in it, so we've been filming for it this summer.

"We're going to do the same sort of thing we did in B-Road Movie, going in and out of the film, interacting with ourselves on screen.

"We'll be looking at Hitchcock movies, Psycho and The Birds, and movies like The Omen and ones you're too scared to watch, where you develop a technique to skip the really scary bits and flick over to...Oh look, Golfers' Wives."

Very Little Women, Lip Service, York Theatre Royal, October 12 to 16. Tickets: £3.50 to £17.50 on 01904 623568.

Updated: 16:02 Thursday, October 07, 2004