Claire Dowie is a fascinating character; a stand-up who doesn’t tell jokes, an actor who feels uncomfortable acting, a lesbian who settled down with a gay man to have a baby. She has admirably ploughed her own furrow, winning acclaim for her candid one-woman plays and pioneering a new genre – what she calls stand-up theatre – along the way.

Buy Little, Buy Less... sees Dowie describing with characteristic directness what happens when a woman who loves Primark’s every cheap-fitting and bargain thong suddenly loses her interest in shopping. Before long, she’s unable to even set foot in a supermarket and is forced to find alternative means of surviving, which starts with eating at other people’s houses and ends with rummaging through bins for discarded food and dancing gaily in an early-morning disco with other “shopaphobics”.

The delivery is fast-paced and colloquial and feels autobiographical (that’s the stand-up element, then) while segments where Dowie crawls arduously through a clothes rail or describes a spirit she saw from a moving train belong in a more theatrical category.

Perhaps surprisingly, it comes across not as an anti-capitalist diatribe so much as a musing on alternative ways of living. It needs fine-tuning but even at this early stage, the style, content and honesty is refreshing.