Maureen Lipman has grown so used to being typecast, she can’t imagine it any other way. Why else would she protest about landing a role in Daytona even though everyone insisted she’d be perfect?

“It turns out I was perfect. I really am,” she says in surprise and then howls with laughter when she realises how conceited that sounds, when actually she’s just surprised.

“It’s just that I don’t normally play the woman who gets the man, let alone two of them, I never saw myself as that girl. And I’ve always been typecast. They would never cast me in Northanger Abbey for example, they just wouldn’t think of me, but then you win some....” she tails off.

Appearing in a new play is equally as exciting for Maureen who was shown the script when both she and playwright Oliver Cotton were starring in Barefoot In the Park together last year.

“Oliver told me he’d written a play which he wanted me to see. So I read it and loved it. Potentially it was fantastically good,” she remembers, ”but Oli had only written two drafts and then stopped and lost faith. So it just needed a bit of life breathed into it and some belief,” both of which Maureen supplied in buckets, except of course where she is concerned.

“Well, we are all dysmorphic and not the people we see in the mirror and as over the years I’ve always played the ditzy, funny characters I Miranda Hart before Miranda Hart. The thing about our generation is that we are all insecure and while we try to be very encouraging we secretly believe we are rubbish.”

Either way, with Maureen on board the play began gathering attention with increasing speed. “I did a fundraising do at Finsbury Park Theatre and told them about this play and they said they’d put it on it if I was in it, even though I told them I didn’t think the part was for me,” Maureen adds.

“But actually I love the part and I love this play. It’s almost as if everything I have done, and the last 46 years I’ve been acting, have been leading up to this. It’s extraordinary and very powerful emotionally,” she says seriously.

That such a grande dame of British theatre can still get so excited about a role is inspiring, and presumably why she’s still in such demand. But then she does love a challenge our Maureen, having directed Barefoot in the Park herself as well as starring in it, a decision she described at the time as “pure masochism, nothing short of megalomania.”

A fledgling playwright must have been a breeze then after that?

“No, it doesn't get easier if that’s what you mean. I’m still listening to the tape every night after six weeks because this is an enormous role and a huge part. It’s a massive learn so not easy because Daytona is intelligent and difficult, but I like that, and far better than doing the same job in the same frock,” she smiles.

“And thankfully Barefoot In The Park was a massive success, so if I think of something, I’d love to go back and have another go, if they’ll have me.”

In the meantime she’s got Daytona to perform every night which she says is: ”a mountain to climb every night” and one she’s relishing. “It’s a huge emotional rollercoaster from the moment you step on stage right at the beginning — it just goes, its extraordinary and you just have to hold on, its got everything.

“It’s quite an old fashioned built play, but it grips you so you can hear a feather drop,” and then the 67-year-old pauses before adding mournfully: ”although the downside is that you can also hear people’s mobile phones,” before embarking on hilarious rant.

“I mean people actually text during the play,” she says incredulously. “They are probably texting ‘at great play’ but it’s theatre! “We must change that mentality so people live in the moment because it’s coming to a head. It’s about mindfulness. How difficult can it be to turn off your phone? It’s like the hosepipe ban. “People just don’t think it applies to them,” she says indignantly.

Even though Maureen Lipman is right, you can’t take the Jewish mother/ BT advert character out of her for a minute, its innate and has done her very well over the years.

“I suppose so,” she says doubtfully, “and as Daytona has a Jewish angle, and is about survivors, I have some experience of that, although its not central to the role,” she adds, having lost her beloved husband Jack Rosenthal in 2004.

Throwing herself into work, it seems is her answer. So does Maureen ever relax? “No, I’m never still, although I’m getting better at smelling the flowers and pottering about in the garden, doing other things,” she says unconvincingly. “But while work can be taxing, it is also very thrilling and extremely exciting.”

She deserved a great play like this then? “No one gets their just rewards because they are always searching for the next new thing,” she replies archly. “In fact a friend came to see my play the other night and went to the wrong one, ending up in another theatre watching people having sex and using flick knives and it got more angry and violent until he had to leave. And as he couldn’t get out, he just walked across the stage,” she says howling with laughter.

“And yet these are the plays supposedly ‘moving theatre on’,” she says throwing her hands up in exasperation, a point on which I beg to disagree. It’s Maureen moving us on, and we’re enraptured as always.

Oxford Playhouse

September 23-28

Box office: 01865 305305, oxfordplayhouse.com