CAN it really be 25 years since Maggie Fox and Sue Ryding started creating comedic lunacy with a brand of theatre of the seemingly impossible that has become their trademark?

They are still at it: two women, one stage, not much of a budget, and so many characters to play. To celebrate their silver jubilee of silliness, they are touring LipService Best Bits, a comedy confection of daft delights from Withering Looks, Very Little Women, King Arthur And The Knights Of The Occasional Table and The Importance Of Being Earnest, coupled with film clips from B-Road Movie and Horror For Wimps.

Next Friday and Saturday, Maggie, the tall one from North Yorkshire, and Sue, the shorter one from the wrong side of the Pennines, will be parading their Best Bits in York, the city that has played its prominent part in LipService’s success story.

Twenty-five years, Maggie! “Fortunately, we started very young. Actually we started at Bristol University, where we met in the drama department,” she recalls. “We were in a production of The Lady From The Sea, which turned in to a tragedy for Ibsen as we were in it! It just didn’t work as a piece of classic drama, but we did make it rather more humorous than it should have been, and though people hadn’t really found the humour in Ibsen before, we definitely did.”

Maggie and Sue promptly decided they should do more comedy together. “But there weren’t that many women in comedy at that time, yet when you look back at music hall, there had been,” says Maggie. “Until Victoria Wood, you didn’t have anyone writing their own material, and then along came French and Saunders.”

And LipService too. “We didn’t think of ourselves as writers at first but because no one was writing, we had to write for ourselves,” says Maggie.

From performing in her earlier days for the Copmanthorpe Players and York Settlement Community Players, Maggie was now heading to London with Sue to perform as part of the alternative cabaret scene, alongside the likes of Alexei Sayle, Keith Allen and Attila The Stockbroker.

“We would be sandwiched between two very cross, shouting men,” says Sue.

“It was the time of the ranting poets, and we’d come on and do our flopsy-bunny humour – though back then we were tub-thumping feminists. Well, that was our early incarnation.”

They performed at York Arts Centre in that incarnation. “If it hadn’t been for people who ran places like that, who allowed you to take your chance…I worry now in this present climate that such places don’t tend to take risks, but they did with us, and so you build an audience for your work.”

Withering Looks was the show that really put LipService on the map. “Who would have thought there’d be comedy in the Brontes with all their coughing and tuberculosis?!” ponders Maggie. “But we weren’t lampooning the Brontes, more the gift-shop culture that now surrounds them.

“I do remember one iconic night when the whisper went round that the Bronte Society, the great bastions, the keeper of the Bronte flame, were in the audience, and I thought, ‘Oh my god, they’re going to close us down’, but it turned out the curator went to school with me in Tadcaster.

“They loved the show so much that our programme went into the Bronte exhibition at the Parsonage.”

Once the York Theatre Royal gave LipService a Sunday night slot after seeing the company at the Arts Centre, the company was on a roll, and it was appropriate that Maggie and Sue should return there for the premiere production of their first foray into musical comedy, Desperate To Be Doris, the one with the 50-strong York community choir and the Doris Day songs.

“I think we could keep doing it for the rest of our lives in different towns; the success of that show has been incredible,” says Maggie, who puts its popularity down to two factors. “Doris Day has huge appeal, but also people don’t have enough silliness in their lives.

“People don’t have many opportunities to put a daffodil on their head and do a Busby Berkeley routine to Secret Love.”

Class act

School report from Pauline Chadwick (now Pauline Marshall), Maggie Fox’s former teacher.

“As head of German at Tadcaster Grammar School in the 1970s, I had the pleasure of teaching Maggie Fox and her elder brother, the composer Christopher Fox.

“Both were extremely talented in many ways, but Maggie (or Margaret, as I knew her) had a fantastic stage presence from an early age.

“At that time I co-directed school drama productions of The Crucible, in which she played the role of Mary Warren, and The Caucasian Chalk Circle, in which she played the role of the Governor’s wife.

“Neither part was a showcase for comedic talent, but the Brecht showed Maggie’s obvious gifts as a character actress – she gave a fully mature performance at the age of 17 and went on to gain a place in the National Youth Theatre, which we all knew would be the start of a brilliant career.

“I have followed her performances with LipService with great joy and admiration.”

• LipService Best Bits, York Theatre Royal, next Friday, 7.30pm and Saturday, 2.30pm and 7.30pm. Box office: 01904 623568 or yorktheatreroyal.co.uk