When you’re at school, you tend to assume your teachers are fully functioning adults who have life all figured out. Then a few years pass, you reach the age they were when they taught you, and you’re startled to realise that perhaps they weren’t quite as together as you thought.

In Maddie Rice’s one-woman play Pickle Jar, Miss is a young English teacher struggling to find her footing both in and out of the classroom. Away from work, she’s just been dumped and can’t stop obsessing over how bad her life is compared to everyone else’s. At work, her approach to teaching is to try and be friends with her teenage pupils, who fascinate her with their apparent confidence and worldliness – it often seems her attempts to connect with them are as much for her own comfort and support as they are for her students’ benefit.

Maddie Rice, who previously starred in the touring production of Fleabag, was encouraged by that show’s creator, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, to write something that made her laugh or cry. Pickle Jar ticks both boxes. Directed by Katie Pesskin, the first half of the show is straight-up, laugh-out-loud comedy, as Miss reflects on everything from her meagre Instagram follower count, to the night her ex broke up with her (shortly after advising her to get tested for chlamydia), to her fumbling attempts – egged on by best friend Mairead – at flirtation with Mr Ellis, the much-fancied food tech teacher.

And then, about halfway through, the story takes a dark turn, and just keeps getting darker as one twist follows another, ultimately catching us off guard with some very uncomfortable, and topical, questions around consent and victim blaming. The humour is still present, but the laughs become far less frequent, and the overwhelming emotion we feel as the show comes to an end is much closer to anger than amusement. Even in the #metoo era, the fact that a female character feels she has to shoulder any of the responsibility for a man’s actions shows how very far we still have to go.

One thing that’s immediately clear is that Maddie Rice is an exceptional performer, bringing an extensive cast of characters, a complex back-and-forth timeline, and a number of different locations to life without ever missing a beat. Colleagues, friends, students, strangers: they’re all here, and all perfectly distinct from each other. Miss in particular is a well-drawn, realistically flawed character who most of the show’s target audience – women in their 20s and 30s – can identify with to some extent (whether we’re willing to admit it or not). The half hour that we spend getting to know her, laughing with – and at – her, never feels like wasted time, even though it delays the show getting to its actual point.

There’s so much to enjoy about Pickle Jar, a very funny and brilliantly acted hour of theatre that will no doubt resonate with teachers, women and indeed anyone still trying to figure out how this whole adulting thing works (which, let’s be honest, is most of us). But behind the laughter, the play does have a point to make – and it’s a point that needs to be heard and acted on, however uncomfortable that might be.

Can’t see the map on iPhone? Try turning your phone to landscape and that should sort it. I don’t know why but I’m working on it… 😉