IMOGEN Stubbs is howling with laughter as we recollect her days in The Oxford Revue.

She recounts a hysterical story about turning up for a gig at the Oxford Playhouse without enough material and having to improvise with props.

“Oh, it was so awful I can hardly even talk about it,” she laughs.

“Our first sketch was really good, but it only lasted 15 mins and we still had an hour and a quarter to fill. I remember one sketch where I appeared dressed as a nun and had to pull a cord and turn into a penguin, but the string snapped and I stood there in front of a stony audience and just died,” she remembered.

“I also had lots of cabbages and some stuffed dogs on elastic and turned up drunk because we’d just finished our finals, and the Playhouse was horrified.”

It’s amazing that Imogen carried on with her acting after her experiences on stage while at Oxford University, but she said she had a fatalist attitude, and if she got into RADA she’d be an actress. She did, and that was that.

And having appeared in some huge blockbusters including Twelfth Night, Sense & Sensibility and Jack and Sarah, has been in huge demand ever since.

The 48-year-old, who lives in London, says she now wonders if she should have done more with her first degree in English, but helps satisfy her literary cravings by writing travel features for the Daily Telegraph, as well as book reviews for The Times.

“I see myself as a poor man’s Bill Bryson,” she smiles. “But I do like genuine places, the unexplored and undiscovered, which are often quite dangerous.”

Her travelling has taken her all over the world from horse-riding in Kyrgyzstan to safari with Kenya’s Maasai Mara, China to Alaska and Guatemala.

But then she’s always liked an adventure, and when she lived out in her third year at Oxford, she rented a ruined cottage in woods near Begbroke without electricity or running water.

“It was owned by a professor who used it in the summer and we rented it for £7 a week,” she recalls.

“We got all our water from a well and had to walk a mile to get to it. It was thrillingly mad and we spent most of our time in front of the fire writing songs because we couldn’t work in the evenings as we didn’t have any light. I went back there recently and it was a Barratt home site.”

Imogen will be back in Oxford at the Playhouse from Monday in Alphabetical Order by Michael Frayn, a play set in a provincial newspaper in the 1970s. In it she plays Lucy, a librarian, whose muddled cuttings library is as confused as the lives of those who work for the paper.

“It’s not a comedy, it’s important to get that across,” she says.

“It’s not Noises Off. It’s about the human need to restore order to chaos. It’s more of a philosophical drama with jokes,” she stressed.

Imogen also has two children aged 13 and 18, three grown-up step-children and is married to Sir Trevor Nunn. So does she ever use the Lady Nunn title?

“Of course not. Trevor earned his, he’s very successful and has given a lot to charity over the years, but I’m just his appendage. I think I have it on a credit card for travel emergencies, but otherwise no,” she insists, firmly. Imogen is delighted to be heading back to Oxford again, admitting to many a nostalgia trip when remembering her student days.

“I sometimes think how nice it would be to be back on a bike cycling through Oxford in the autumn on the way to a pub or a lecture where we had all read the same books, or a concert. I loved that.”

Imogen Stubbs will be appearing in Alphabetical Order by Michael Frayn from Monday. Box office on 01865 305305.