Lip Service, The Importance Of Being Earnest, York Theatre Royal, November 27 to December 1

COMIC duo Lip Service satirise the serious and the sensible. They have extracted the Michael from the Bronte sisters in Withering Looks, Mills & Boon romance in Women On The Verger, detective novels in Move Over Moriarty, even Margaret Thatcher in Margaret III.

What's more, York actress Maggie Fox and Sue Ryding play every role themselves, write the scripts and move the scenery to boot.

Not this time, however. Lip Service's latest touring show is The Importance Of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde's classic comedy of social manners, for which Maggie and Sue have been joined by a cast of thousands... well, seven.

"It's been a great liberation for us to just concentrate on the performance rather than worrying if a line we've written is working or not," says Maggie, who will be appearing at York Theatre Royal next week. "Amazingly, we've found a cast as mad as we are, fully prepared to go to the extremes of madness like we do."

This production, premiered at the Bolton Octagon two years ago and revived this year, amounts to a reversal of the usual Lip Service working practice. Instead of a send-up of a target ripe for spoofing, they are making serious points about a play that Wilde subtitled "a trivial comedy for serious people".

"What we're doing with it is trying to do it afresh," says Maggie. "It's become the tea and cucumber sandwich play with the handbag, and so it's lost its shock - not least the secret meanings of some of the expressions Wilde wrote for his male friends - but it is a hugely scandalous piece."

Behind polite English society manners, everyone is harbouring a secret in Wilde's comic drama. For example, who is the mysterious invalid Mr Bunbury? Is the terrifying Lady Bracknell all she is cracked up to be? What is Miss Prism's awful truth?

"It's a play full of scandal, prejudice, lies and deceit; it's Gentlemen Behaving Badly, and we wanted to bring back that thing of everyone trying to be someone else, but who are they really?"

That should make for a fascinating production, as should the decision of Lip Service director Lawrence Till and designer Richard Foxton to move the play from late-Victorian times - it was first staged in 1895 - to the 1950s. "That was the last era where there were rules of etiquette, when there was still an element of formality," Maggie says. "Besides, Lawrence loves the music of the Fifties, and you get to wear fab frocks too."

Not everyone will rejoice at the news of the Fifties setting. "There are some purists who just want the Edith Evans version but for those who want a new interpretation that's true to the text - though not necessarily in the right order! - then we're showing it all anew," says Maggie.

She takes the smattering of criticism in her stride, not least because she can point to every show selling out at the Manchester Library Theatre, where queues formed each night for returned tickets. "We've had the odd e-mail - and I do mean odd - and anonymous letters saying you can only play it the way it was always played and they're entitled to that opinion," says Maggie. "But it's dead theatre just doing it the traditional Wilde way: he's still relevant today, so it's like modernising Shakespeare."

Do not, however, form the impression that Lip Service are being earnest with Earnest. "Just as everyone is trying to be someone else in this play, in Lip Service we're always whizzing about being someone else, so with Earnest we wanted to do that cross-dressing thing we're known for," Maggie says.

In this instance, that means Maggie and Sue starting the play in the roles of Jack and Algernon, Maggie then progressing to Lady Bracknell and Sue to a variety of roles. "There's an awful lot of very improbable wigs in this show," Maggie says.

That said, nothing surely will come as much of a surprise as spotting Maggie in a role devoid of humour in Coronation Street earlier this year, when she played Hayley Cropper's partner from her pre sex-change days. "They had this character description: woman who lives on her own, of dodgy gender but not very masculine, slightly introverted, with a dark past... and they thought of me. Thanks very much!," she recalls.

"They knew me from doing very silly roles but they wanted me for this androgynous part - well, I have done plenty of trouser-wearing in Lip Service, I suppose - and I had to be totally serious, which is very different for me. I had to tone down every expression for television."

She has since filmed the role of Bilston the housekeeper for Granada TV's re-make of the Sixties series The Forsyte Saga. "I had to be deadly serious again, but now I'm on the road once more with Lip Service, I can let my features go wild again."

Or perhaps that should be go Wilde again.

Lip Service, The Importance Of Being Earnest, York Theatre Royal, November 27 to December 1. Performances: 7.30pm, Tuesday to Friday; 2.30pm Wednesday; 4pm, 8pm, Saturday. Tickets: £7 to £15, concessions available; ring 01904 623568.