About a third of the way into Girl From Nowhere, Jeannie (Victoria Rigby) picks up her guitar, and finally lets rip that bluesy rock and roll she loves. From her box filled attic we are transported to a smokey saloon bar and she’s quite simply killing it.

It’s 1969 in Coyote Creek, Texas. Jeannie is back home surrounded by old boxes and records, her mother asking through the door if she’s hungry or thinks she may be hungry in the near future, as only mothers do. But she’s got a record to set straight. This is the other side of that ‘I’m-getting-the-hell-out-of-this-small-town’ story: coming back.

It’s rare, I find, to carry off a one woman show without it feeling too much like one. But Rigby does it with just the right combination of swagger, pain and an impatient, defiant refusal to regret. We hear Jeannie’s story to hippy stardom and back again as she sings and drinks and shags her way around sixties Texas, refusing to pander to those expectations piled upon women who grow up in small towns.

I was put in mind of all those female stars from the sixties I love, because Girl From Nowhere is a subtle look at the lot of women, judged by the men they dated instead of the music they made. It was so much easier for the boys, as Jeannie’s whole reason for telling this story shows quite clearly.

Julie Burchill once said, ‘a girl in a dress with a guitar looks weird. Like a dog riding a bicycle. Very odd. Hard to get past it’. Victoria Rigby’s Jeannie isn’t wearing a dress, but she certainly proves the girl with a guitar fallacy utterly wrong

Girl from Nowhere plays at Pleasance That – Pleasance Courtyard 5-31 August. For more information click here.