THIS feels like an odd case of déjà vu. It is not so many months since Elaine Stritch, that tall, gruff and opinionated grande dame of Broadway, held court in London. Now comes a one-woman show with Bea Arthur, an actress who is every bit as opinionated, looks even taller and has a voice that makes Bogart sound like a sissy.

Their paths have crossed before. In the course of her extravagant performance, Stritch related the story of how she managed to fluff the audition for a promising TV sitcom that seemed destined to bring her a nest-egg for her twilight years. The name of that show, dear reader, was The Golden Girls, a portrait of middle-aged friends adrift in Florida’s retirement zone. No prizes for guessing the name of the actress who did win a starring part.

Stritch, however, is a hard act to follow. Along with the salty backstage anecdotes and the Sondheim anthems, her show supplied searing glimpses of her turbulent love life and struggles with the bottle.

Arthur has had a distinguished career in her own right — she was the original Yente the matchmaker in Fiddler On The Roof — but her script is more lightweight. It still makes for an amiable entertainment, peppered with theatrical in-jokes and droll gossip. But grand passions and soul-searching are missing.

She makes an imposing hostess as she rises from her armchair. A spry octogenarian with an acid tongue, she has great fun recalling encounters with Mae West and Tallulah Bankhead. Poor old Jerome Robbins — who was, it seems, hardly the world’s warmest soul — is dispatched in a couple of tart paragraphs. Arthur also serves up a couple of unabashedly smutty jokes including an unlikely encounter between a nun and a taxi driver.

Billy Goldenberg turns in an understated display as her mildly harassed accompanist. The songs themselves are a decidedly mixed bunch. Like Stritch, Arthur is often happy simply to talk her way through the notes. While the approach works well on a song as conversational as Cy Coleman’s Isn’t He Adorable, a certain repetitiveness creeps in elsewhere.

The extracts from Goldenberg’s show Queen of the Stardust Ballroom lacked colour. Arthur’s version of Some People was defiantly robust, though, as was I Happen To Like New York. She made the most of the ripe doubles entendres of If I Can’t Sell It, I’ll Keep Sittin’ On It, a favourite of the blues diva Ruth Brown.

Arthur summoned up risqué echoes of Sophie Tucker, too. She is engagingly unsentimental when it comes to evoking memories of her own younger self, “enormous” breasts and all. She believes in plain speaking. Old age is unlikely to get the better of her.