Since childhood, Katie Norris has been called an “old soul” – which won’t surprise anyone who saw her solo debut Farm Fatale, a gothic melodrama in character as a Miss Havisham-like spinster, crazy for cats. Something of that remains in Go West, Old Maid, where we meet again the gen Z flatmates to whom Norris plays “cool governess”. But it’s worn more lightly here, put on for laughs to startle us, and slipped out of when – the thrust of the show, this – she wants to talk about her late dad, a plummy thespian dispensing useless advice to Katie across not so much a generation gap as a chasm.
That gives Norris the only excuse she needs to open with a withering takedown of “old dads”, and an enjoyable fantasy of herself becoming a mum in her 80s. She has great fun with her predilection for man-crushing here, notably in a song, about being a godmother that imagines her exes turned into toads at the bottom of her garden. An even finer number conjures her father’s nostalgia for his theatrical golden age – and by that stage, the song is amusing and tender in equal measure, because we have heard he went to a brutal boarding school with Boris Johnson’s dad, and so he has our deepest sympathy.
In between, some asides about Norris’s secretive mum (raising so many questions as to almost knock the dead-dad show off its axis), a routine about her personal trainer, and a show-and-tell about her new taxidermy habit. Cumulatively, Go West, Old Maid doesn’t make quite the impact of Farm Fatale: there’s something anticlimactic about its dramatic shape, and the act-out of her father’s supposed play script feels like a generic nugget of audience participation.
But at her best, for most of this show, Norris isn’t generic in the slightest. She has developed such a distinctive and diverting persona: threatening (but just for fun), eccentric and proud of it in her “Victorian bellboy” outfit, apt at any moment to drop an unhinged aside or out-of-the-blue song – like the cracker here celebrating the missionary position. “Old soul”, she may be, but Norris’s act is in glorious full bloom.