Men playing women is as old as theatre itself. Women playing men playing women is a considerably more novel proposition. Next week, as part of Homotopia, Liverpool’s cultural jamboree of all things lesbian, gay and transgender, Amanda Lawrence will play Charles Hawtrey, the cross-dressing star of the Carry On films, in a one-“man” show called Jiggery Pokery.

The production explores the polarities of the actor’s life, from celebrated performer to solipsistic sot. As Lawrence, 38, shifts between episodes from his childhood, old age, film and theatre work, she also impersonates those he met along the way, including Laurence Olivier, Barbara Windsor and Hawtrey’s beloved, senile mother.

I meet Lawrence in a fusty rehearsal room. Props are strewn across the wooden furniture: small round spectacles, large white gentlemen’s underpants and a black feather fan. I ask her to put the glasses on. She holds her hair back, places the old-fashioned curly hooks behind her ears and looks up. The resemblance is astonishing — almost unnerving. Lawrence has precisely the pointy nose, wiry frame and crinkly neck that gave Hawtrey that unusually avian appearance.

She starts to “do” him. Her chin goes up, her eyes look down, a saucy sneer surfaces: “Oh, hello.” In two words Lawrence has conjured the eccentric in all his fey haughtiness. “Now look, Mother . . .” she continues, uncannily accurately. How did the production come about? “Four years ago,” Lawrence recalls, “I was playing a pirate in The Firework Maker’s Daughter. I had little round glasses on and some audience members said to me afterwards: ‘God, you really look like Charlie Hawtrey.’ Then a biography of him came out and Paul Hunter, the director, said: ‘There’s something we could build here.’ So I watched lots of Hawtrey’s films and copied him. At first it was an impersonation but it became more about capturing his spirit. I started improvising scenes and developing a script with the writer Bryony Lavery.”

Lawrence became increasingly immersed in the figure. “I’m very interested in playing a man who’s more comfortable being a woman,” she says. “That is immediately theatrical.”

Despite the apparent challenges inherent in a production that involves, at times, a double gender switch, Lawrence seems undaunted. “If I was a man I’d be Charlie Hawtrey,” she says affectionately. “To him, ‘becoming’ a woman felt like a small step. ” Indeed, in his biography of Hawtrey, The Man Who Was Private Widdle, Roger Lewis reveals that in the last year of his life the actor would sign letters “Alice Dunne”.

Hawtrey’s career began in 1922, when he was 8. He appeared in films, made recordings as a boy soprano and performing male and female roles in music revue and straight theatre alongside such icons as Vivian Leigh. From the late 1930s he enjoyed a run of successful comedy films starring opposite Will Hay.

But in 1972, after 24 Carry On films, Hawtrey was sacked from the series because of his prodigious drinking. His career imploded. He moved to Deal in Kent and descended even farther into dipsomania. “Getting drunk and dusting is all I do now,” he said.

Lawrence went to Deal to speak to the locals, many of whom had known Hawtrey before his death in 1988. “One woman said: ‘He was like how was in the Carry On films — only not funny. He was horrible; he looked down on us.’ ” Lewis describes how the actor got banned from pubs for being drunk and abusive. “When he was having sex,” Lawrence adds, “he would shout explicit things out of the window to offend.”

He sounds monstrous, I say. “No,” Lawrence argues, “damaged. A lot of people say Charles was lovely in the early part of his life; but then he got stuck in in the Carry Ons and became embittered.”

Lawrence seems to be very fond of her alter-ego. She describes how Hawtrey was with his mother and friends one day, telling a story and smoking. His cigarette fell into his mother’s handbag, so it started billowing smoke, and without blinking he simply slammed the handbag shut and carried on with his story. In 1984 one of his famous Woodbines sparked a massive house fire. “He took all his clothes off, ran to the top of the building and asked for the biggest fireman to come and rescue him. Quite wonderful,” she says.

Where did the name for the production come from? “It’s a line from Carry On Doctor. Charlie says [mimicking his voice]: ‘I don’t mind the jiggery, but I do take exception to pokery.’ ” And Lawrence emits an exquisitely camp cackle.

Jiggery Pokery is at the Unity Theatre, Liverpool (0151-709 4988), Nov 11-14, as part of Homotopia, then touring

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