IT’S a bit like not asking George Michael about Wham! or a famous EastEnders actor about their role in the soap.

I feared it might provoke a frosty reaction, but I simply had to ask Laura Solon how it felt to be one of just two women to win the Edinburgh Festival’s top comedy award.

When the time came, the question passed almost without incident, Laura rather nonchalantly replying: “I don’t think it really matters whether you’re a man or a woman. It’s just great to win.”

She’s talking about winning a Perrier Award with her 2005 debut solo show, a feat all the more impressive when you learn the show was hastily rewritten a matter of weeks before.

Kopfraper’s Syndrome: One Man and His Incredible Mind, was the title, but it had nothing to do with the final show – it was just the title Laura and her co-writer sent the festival organisers.

She explained: “I didn’t have to write everything from scratch.

“The other guy got a new job which meant he couldn’t go, so it was a question of writing a solo show. The name was already in the brochure, so there wasn’t much I could do about that.”

In the winning show, Laura played eight different characters, including a wedding planner from Rotherham, a hunter who does not believe in zebras and a marketing assistant forced to dress as a bookworm.

Since then, she has dabbled with TV, notably BBC One’s Ruddy Hell! It’s Harry and Paul, and ITV 1’s Al Murray’s Multiple Personality Disorder. She also still writes and performs a long-running Radio 4 character sketch show, Talking and Not Talking.

Now she’s out on the road again, with her first stage show since Kopfraper’s Syndrome Rabbit Faced Story Soup premiered at Edinburgh last summer and sees Laura once again creating a collection of weird and wonderful characters.

Set in a publishing company on the brink of financial ruin, among others, Laura plays the publisher Diana Lewis, an American super agent, a lightly-tanned boss, a French novellist – and a dead rabbit called Ian.

The show also includes characters familiar to listeners to her radio shows, including a divorcee children’s author Carol Price and Gwynneth the call centre worker who is prone to offer completely useless advice.

Laura said: “The ideas for characters come from all kinds of places. The author came from a book signing, where I saw this American author talking about herself, but the French novelist is there, just because I’d always wanted to do a French novelist.

“The idea of linking them all into one story was a bit of challenge, but I wanted to do something different to the normal sketch show format.

“I like a challenge. One of my ambitions is to win Wimbledon – and the thing is, a part of me thinks I can actually win it.”

l Laura Solon’s Rabbit Faced Story Soup is at the Colchester Arts Centre tomorrow at 8.30pm. Doors open at 8pm and tickets are £10 (£8 concessions), available from the box office, on 01206 500900 or from colchesterartscentre.com