Austen-based comedy turns out (unsurprisingly) to be my perfect form of entertainment.

In the run up to the performance I was nervous that my tendency to purism would spoil my evening (elements of the Austentatious radio special had felt more Dickensian than Janeite…). I needn’t have worried: Austentatious outclassed all my expectations and they were just too funny for me to quibble.

Rachel Parris (known for ‘The Mash Report’ and more) introduced the show in character as an Austen academic. Luckily she didn’t mock the academic type too much(!). She chose the fourth title shouted out by an audience member: ‘Mansfield Town FC’. I take my hat off to whoever made this suggestion, playing with the coincidental namesake of the Nottinghamshire town in Austen’s Mansfield Park (which I must remind everyone is actually set in Northamptonshire).

What followed was a kind of Austenian ‘She’s the Man’, a girl achieving her dream of playing football despite gender inequality, and falling in love with her brother’s teammate. But the central plot developed into a complex mystery drama that demonstrated the performers’ skilled improvisation.

Making the most of the football theme, they quickly established that the heroine had jilted her fiancé for new Mansfield Town player ‘Harry Kane’. The jilted hero tampered with ‘the breaks’ of Kane’s boots, and he fell into a river and gained a case of ‘wet legs’ which drove the rest of the plot. It was more coherent than it sounds, the incongruity of the events proving highly ridiculous yet somehow compelling.

Each performer successfully inhabited a range of characters and I was left marvelling at their craft. Having briefly attempted improvisation myself I realise it can’t be as easy as the Austentatious team made it look.

Of course, the inevitable Rebekah Vardy joke was there for the taking, delivered by Lauren Shearing. What a week for a football theme.