Shazia Mirza

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Shazia Mirza has a lot more experience onstage than in the bedroom, as she freely admits in this new show. Purportedly about her unusually advanced virginity, it’s in fact a slight rejigging of the same few subjects that she’s been talking about for years now: the pressures of being a modern Muslim with traditional parents; the under-the-radar racism of the chattering classes; some taboo aspects of female sexuality.

As in previous years, she is unable to move any of these interesting subjects beyond the realms of the moderately funny. There are some good anecdotes about her domineering mother and a nice line about her Irish atheist boyfriend, who "acts as if God fucked him over before not existing." Other than that, we don’t get more than a few shock laughs about labias stuck in bus doors and an over-long, weakly executed story about meeting the Queen.

Mirza’s delivery is still oddly cagey, despite her clear desire to connect with her ‘Guardian-reading’ audience. She speaks most of her lines to the ceiling and often blames us when we don’t ‘go for’ a weak joke, implying that we’re too PC. Rattling through her material as though scared to make full use of it, she has the air of a comedian with only a few dozen gigs under her belt, making the mistake of hiding behind her script. There’s no shame in being a 30-something virgin, but when you choose to spend time with such a seasoned performer you expect more satisfaction than this.