Phill Jupitus and Andre Vincent are like two peas in a pod - whether they like it or not.

"People get confused all the time," says Andre. "In fact, Phill has shaved his beard off while I've still got mine, so I now look more like Phill than Phill does.

"We were walking along together at the Latitude Festival this year when this family said, 'Hey Phill, can we take a picture with you?' I moved back so they could take the photo but they all gathered around me. Phill's just standing there and the dad says to him, 'Make yourself useful will you mate', and hands him the camera."

While the production pictures might not convince, there really is a striking facial similarity between these two popular stand-up comedians - oh yeah, and a certain comparable portliness. It's easy to see, then, why they have taken on the twin roles of Lewis Carroll's Tweedledee and Tweedledum in their self-penned homage to those well-loved characters who never attained protagonist status.

"All those unsung people like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Falstaff Tweedledum and Tweedledee and all the rest, they're like the driving forces in their stories. They help the story along," says Andre. "This play's a good chance to play tribute to the unsung heroes."

The play finds Dum and Dee locked together in a semantic quandary as they ponder the effects of being characters in a children's book that hasn't been picked up for more than 60 years.

They go about their daily lives, the prissy Dum refusing to talk to the more carefree Dee (until his brother coaxes him out of silence by exploiting his love of rhyme). Eventually they realise they are caught in a metaphysical limbo: If nobody reads their copy of Alice In Wonderland do they really exist and will Alice ever turn up?

With existential angst and Alice's absence, Waiting For Alice in theory bears comparison to Samuel Beckett's Waiting For Godot - but, says Andre, the title aside, the two have little in common.

"It was in our minds at first, obviously - it was with the title," says Andre. "But then we saw an old copy of Waiting For Godot starring Burgess Meredith and Zero Mostel which was made in the Sixties. We only realised then how boring that play is, so we decided to go off in our own direction with it."

The idea originated after Phil and Andre went to see "a play about gay baseball".

"I said, 'We should do something together," says Andre. "I'll be Tweedledee and you'll be Tweedledum and we'll have the play ready for next year's Edinburgh Festival. That was five years ago."

But the eventually completed show grew into a well-received hit. Now the two shake things up (and stay true to their close-knit characters) by alternating the roles each night.

"We both know the show backwards so it made sense to swap the roles around, to keep us on our toes", says Andre. "Sometimes we do run on and say the other person's lines but I suppose that's in the nature of the characters so it works out well in the end.

"In fact, Laurence Olivier and John Gielgud did the same thing with Shakespeare, before they went on stage they'd say, 'So which one are you going to play today?' We like to think we've at least got that in common."

  • Starts 7.30pm, tickets cost £12/£11. Call 01273 709709.