Lip Reading

Maureen Lipman goes from strength to strength - or, as she sees it, from weak to week. Flailing famously in the turbulent twister that constitutes those four-letter words Home and Work, she has been clutching a biro along the way, and these "collected writhings" are the result. Between churning butter-substitute in the award-winning musical OKLAHOMA! and doling out barley soup in the only Welsh-Yiddish film to win the Genoa Film Festival, she has found time to be trussed up in black plastic in Birmingham, seduced by a wet mammal in Barbados, distorted by a mammogram in a Wood Green car park and painted with yoghurt on a Thai health farm. En route, she has become namesake to a rose and a sewage device, brushed up against Empty Nest Syndrome and Repetitive Train Injury and has effortlessly turned 50 with her chin in the air and a surgical collar on her neck.