FOUR STARS

You don’t have to be feminist to enjoy Rosie Wilby’s new show, Nineties Woman - although when Rosie asked her audience at the Burton Taylor Studio how many saw themselves as feminist, most hands went up, including the men‘s.

But even if you don’t count yourself as a feminist, you could still enjoy this hour-long stroll down memory lane, in which Rosie takes a light-hearted look at her York University days when she was part of a student collective producing feminist newspaper Matrix.

This is an affectionate, gently self-deprecating look at her younger self, in which she marvels at some of her dafter escapades, pokes fun at her rather dodgy hairdo on Yorkshire Student Television and digs beneath the veneer of political conscience to explore some of the other reasons she was so desperate to get involved in the cause - not least to get closer to the woman that everyone, apparently, had a crush on.

The framework for the show is Rosie’s quest to track down the other members of the student collective to see what they are up to now and whether they are still waving the feminist flag.

The audience is introduced to each of these former students via video footage, in which they reminisce with Rosie about those early feminist years, often amid gales of laughter.

The star turn is fellow comedian Zoe Lyons, who cheerfully admits that when she was the ‘lookout’ for some feminist graffiti she would have run away if she had been challenged.

In between these video extracts Rosie chats cosily to the audience and produces relics from her archives, including original copies of Matrix, now looking charmingly old-fashioned.

It is these stand-up sections that are the most entertaining; Rosie is effortlessly funny and has a natural gift for engaging with an audience.

It all adds up to an evening of wit, nostalgia and social commentary, brought together in a perfect little package.