SIMON MUNNERY adopts the regal tone of Elizabeth I and says: “I say to the Italians, Rome wasn’t built in a day. But it might have been if you had spent less time talking with your arms.”

If the audience had come expecting some highbrow adaptation of the attempted wooing of the Virgin Queen by Walter Raleigh, they were very disappointed.

Those of us who love the pen of Stewart Lee, once part of Lee and Herring, but who found international notoriety as the author of Jerry Springer the Opera, felt the exact opposite.

His latest work, which found rave reviews at this year’s Edinburgh Festival, is safe in the hands of the inspirational Munnery as Elizabeth, and Miles Jupp as Raleigh.Ò Jupp copes admirably with being subjected to the indignity of stripping off to his pants and having cold mashed potato forced into his mouth. We won’t mention his codpiece.

However even he can’t keep a straight face when Munnery tries to take an axe to one of Raleigh’s “beloved” potatoes, only to miss wildly.

The production is wonderfully silly – Munnery in a painted white face and grey croc shoes under his Elizabethan dress, jumping up and down on a trampette to signify queenly anger, Jupp appearing in a cloud of dry ice with a ship on his head.

It nods to comic predecessors like Blackadder and even Derek Jarman’s Jubilee, but all’s well that ends well in a rousing rendition of God Save The Queen.