Linda Marlowe is another of the festival’s previous cover girls invited back to celebrate the 10th anniversary.

Ms Marlowe enthused audiences with Berkoff’s Women last time.

This year she has taken the new Poet Laureate’s collection, The World’s Wife and breathes life into the wonderful, often slightly weird, characters Duffy portrays in her poems.

Friday night’s performance was a preview for August’s Edinburgh Festival fringe. It is still a work in progress the actress insisted, although it looked pretty well honed to me.

We meet Queen Herod, Queen Kong, Mrs Quasimodo, The Kray Sisters and the supremely succinct Mrs Darwin: “7 April, 1852. Went to the Zoo. I said to Him – Something about that chimpanzee over there, reminds me of you.”

They are strongly feminist poems, but many of the men in the audience sought out Ms Marlowe after the show to say how much they enjoyed them.

Mrs Midas was both funny and sad, a woman in love with her man but increasingly alarmed as everything he touches turns to gold, and she isn’t about to be the next gilded object.

Eurydice has a similarly contemporary take on the tale of Orpheus (or Big O) desperate to rescue Eurydice from the dead, never imagining that is the last thing she wants.

It’s a minimalist set – a chair, some racks for the quick change costumes which suggest the characters more than adequately, excellent lighting and a screen announcing the subject of the poem. The last keeps the show tight and atmospheric, saving the need for explanations and introductions, which risk turning a performance into a lecture, or intruding on the unity of performer and audience.

I’m certain Ms Marlow has created a new bunch of Duffy fans, as well as many of her own.