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.
