Elaine Stritch at Liberty, Old Vic, London

Song-and-gabfest breathes new life into that old cliché, 'I'm still here'

On to the bare stage of the Old Vic, wearing just a white shirt and black rehearsal tights, walks the 77-year-old Broadway legend Elaine Stritch. She positions her stool, fixes the audience with a laconic stare and, in that foghorn voice of hers, rasps: "Yeah, well, it's like the prostitute once said: it's not the work – it's the stairs."

Bull's eye. Instant, intimate rapport. But needless modesty. Flagging energy is as much of a problem for this star as inaudibility – a fact she demonstrates with age-defying dynamism in her hugely entertaining one-woman song-and-gabfest, Elaine Stritch at Liberty. Constructed by The New Yorker's theatre critic John Lahr and reconstructed by Stritch, it's an event that artfully counterpoints hilarious confessional anecdotes with knock-'em-dead renditions of the show-stoppers she belted out in such musicals as Pal Joey, Noel Coward's Sail Away and Stephen Sondheim's Company.

The piece may buy heavily into the myth of the showbiz diva as doughty, indestructible survivor, with Stritch recounting at length her (eventually successful) battles with booze, stage-fright, and heartbreak. But people who have a raging allergy to that overworked anthem "I'm Still Here" would none the less find themselves disarmed and delighted by the experience. Our heroine is unfailingly fresh, funny and ruefully honest even when flirting with theatrical cliché or threatening to turn the occasion into an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting with gags.

Once regularly pickled, Stritch is now just beautifully preserved. In her younger tippling days, she seems to have had a major talent for being her own worst enemy. On the point of tying the knot in Rome with her live-in lover, Ben Gazzara, she got the hots for Rock Hudson and gave her intended the elbow. "And we all know what a bum decision that turned out to be!" she quips. The evening is crammed with that kind of gutsily droll deprecation and it's a non-stop masterclass in comic timing.

Richard Burton once told Stritch that her singing had almost given him an orgasm. "What did he mean – almost?" she carps. So I hope she won't feel too short-changed if I say that her thrilling show pushes you pretty close to ecstasy.