LUNCHTIME at the Jerwood Space in South London: three comics and a director, eating risotto. The team behind Stewart Lee’s new play, Johnson and Boswell – Late But Live, consisting of Lee, Simon Munnery (Johnson), Miles Jupp (Boswell) and director Owen Lewis, are taking a well-earned rest.

“My main worry is that Boswell is supposed to be smaller than Johnson,” says Munnery. In reality, Jupp (Archie the Inventor in Balamory) towers above him. “So part of my preparation for the role is to have risotto every lunchtime. I’m also trying to eat as much of Miles’s risotto as I can.”

The talk around the table is of Galway, where Lee was doing a gig the previous night. All three comics are also doing solo shows on the Fringe and Lewis is directing a second play. Galway went well, Lee says, though he’s concerned that he’s starting to sound like Samuel Johnson.

Lee was approached by producer Iain Gillie to write a two-hander about the two disgruntled gents on their 1773 road trip to the Highlands and Islands. Or at least, he says, that’s what it was before he went to Galway. “I don’t know what they’ve been doing with it while I’ve been away. It could be a puppet show by now.”

“There’s a Greek chorus,” says Munnery, helpfully. The great thing about talking to comedians is that you never know when they’re joking.

In the play, the pair rock up in the Traverse in 2007, “late but live”, to re-launch their travel books, cashing in on the fad for celebrity memoirs.
Post-risotto, Jupp rehearses his introduction. Lee, who wrote Jerry Springer: The Opera and directed last year’s Talk Radio, has written a sharp script which takes no prisoners.

Enter Munnery, who slips into a prim RP accent to deliver Johnson’s acerbic lines, meeting Jupp’s eagerness with a waspish cynicism: “As a dog returns to its vomit, so I have returned to the land of the deep-fried pizza…”

Lee says that, deep-fried pizza additions aside, many of Johnson’s original lines sound remarkably modern. “I like the idea of comedy fans coming along and really laughing at good jokes from 230 years ago, and not knowing that’s what they are.”
He started writing expecting to exploit the comic potential in the differences between Scotland then and now, but in the rehearsal room the piece started to change. “The more interesting thing is the relationship between these two people,” he says now. “We all thought it was going to be a bit of fun, but the second half has become quite a different thing, quite an ambitious thing to do.

“Johnson is like Peter Cook in decline, he’s fed up with being the perfect wit. He lets Boswell down.”

It helps that Jupp and Munnery fit their roles so well. Munnery is himself something a master of the acerbic one-liner, and when Lee ran into Jupp in a pub in Shepherd’s Bush, he looked into his young, plaintive face and knew he’d found his Boswell.

“My relationship with Miles is similar to Johnson and Boswell’s relationship,” says Munnery, deadpan. “He writes down things I say.”

“That’s because I’m trying to make sense of them,” counters Jupp sharply.

Twenty yellow buckets are stacked up tantalisingly at the edges of the rehearsal space. They belong, Lee says, to the physical theatre bit in the second half. Iain Gillie arrived with them one day on his motorbike.

I’m still trying to visualise producer, motorbike and buckets when Lee strides into his next analogy: “I wrote this really complicated bit of physical theatre involving lots of stuff and left them to it. It’s a bit like doing a big shit and leaving them to clean it up!”

“And all we’ve done is spread it about,” says Jupp, as if on cue.

As I leave the rehearsal, I’m cursing the power of a visual imagination. And Lee is still cackling.

• Johnson and Boswell – Late But Live is at the Traverse, Edinburgh, 7-26 August (not 13 or 20)