We are assigning the week’s theatre jobs in the Varsity offices when it gets to Rookie, a new all-female sketch show. Fred Maynard makes a shrewd point: if a girl reviews it and finds it funny, will she be believed? Better send a man for the job.

The lurking ‘woman question’ in comedy (which runs along the lines of, are women funny? do we even like funny women?) is something the Rookie cast are acutely aware of. Over breakfast in Indigo I hear how the show came about. 

The comedy scene in Cambridge, as everywhere, is male-dominated. Celine Lowenthal, the show’s director, explains that though you find girls in comic roles and smokers, they are rarely to be found in high profile sketch shows or on the Footlights committee. “It’s crazy, but it was so difficult to break into the comedy circuit that an exclusively female show seemed necessary just to get heard.”

Rookie is the brainchild of Rosa Robson. Gathering up girls she’d seen in comedies and standup nights, Robson collected five like-minded women and a female director for the project. They then “incarcerated themselves” for two weeks in each other’s homes, brainstorming ideas, working in different pairings, testing their jokes and writing their script.

Whether their material should focus on ‘female issues’ was a question they debated at the beginning of the project. Giulia Galastro recalls that no one was keen to restrict themselves to the familiar female comedian’s territory of menstruation jokes and waxing stories. “Women’s lives are a rich mine for comedy,” says Lowenthal. “There’s so much to play with; the material has a lot of variety.” Galastro does promise one period joke, however. ‘The girl jokes eventually emerged organically – after all, you write what you know.’

For Galastro, the best part of the project has been the chance to develop sketches collaboratively. Compared with the short, sharp audition and performance routine of the fortnightly smokers, which can be intimidating, Rookie was a show that could be nurtured and developed over weeks. “There’s a lot of back and forth, exchanging ideas, right up to the end. If something’s not working in rehearsal you can just change it – the writer is standing right next to you!”

As director, Lowenthal was an audience for the developing material, advising the cast which ideas to expand and which to cut. “Compared to directing straight plays, the process with Rookie has been far more fluid. There isn’t that hierarchy of director/actors – everyone’s comments are valid.”

Setting up a space within Cambridge comedy for women is an exciting breakthrough – for Lowenthal: “the most important show I’ve worked on". The hope is that Rookie will encourage more girls to put themselves forward for comedy. "The talent is there – it’s just a question of confidence and opportunity.”

* Rookie opens on Tue, 31st Jan. at Corpus Playroom starring Rosa Robson, Matilda Wnek, Emma Powell, Ellie Nunn, Guilia Galastro and Temi Wilkey. *