Riki Lindhome describes herself as “delusionally optimistic” and, watching Dead Inside – her one-woman show charting a decade-long fertility journey – you completely believe and relate to it; you’re grateful for the humour amidst the pressures of being a woman. This is a show about miscarriages, silent endometriosis, failed adoption bids, egg freezing, botched abortions, surrogacy, and the creeping dread of a woman being told her biological clock has an opinion. It should be devastating; it often is. And yet, you spend most of it grinning.

As one half of musical comedy duo Garfunkel and Oates (and recognisable to many as a face from The Big Bang Theory and Netflix’s Wednesday), Lindhome arrives with an infectious American pep that is wholly her own. She’ll laugh at her own jokes and you’ll laugh right alongside her, not out of politeness but because she’s genuinely, brilliantly funny. The show opens with Plan A: partner, sex, baby, in that order. Neat. Simple. But as it turns out, absolutely nothing goes to plan.

Lindhome adopts the Disney princess story structure of the hero’s journey or rather, a pointed interrogation of why the hero’s journey was never really written for women. Lindhome draws a running thread through her favourite Disney musical side characters: the woman in Annie who fully commits to every bit, the lady in Beauty and the Beast who simply, desperately needs six eggs. Princess Belle, she notes, seems to have no particular regard for the essential workers and those that make bread. These characters – the try-hards, the overlooked, the ones doing the 5, 6, 7, 8 with nobody watching – feel like the show’s beating heart. We don’t get the fairy godmother who magically appears with all the answers. We figure it out ourselves, usually late, usually alone.

There’s a sequence where she recounts meeting a man called Guy, going through fertility treatment, filming herself injecting hormones in a car park, and falling completely in love with the idea of a noisy life with his two children aged four and seven already filling the house with sound, and being finally ready for that noise. Yet, she loses the pregnancy in the second trimester. He tells her if she still wants her own biological children they have to break up, changing his mind on manifesting a baby together within hours. The silence she returns home to after that is palpable in the room.

What makes Lindhome exceptional is that she never lets the show collapse into tiptoeing around grief, nor does she rush past it. She takes the taboo head-on: why do we wait until the second trimester to announce a pregnancy? She answers her own question: it’s rooted in shame – the shame of loss. The expectation that women deal with it quietly so as not to burden others. She later discovers she has silent endometriosis which means no symptoms, no pain, just the one: infertility. Another thing nobody told her, including within her family’s own history. Another thing women don’t talk about.

The songs are satirically clever and genuinely moving, including a keyboard ballad to the baby she lost (“honey bear”), a wind-machine-and-tiara number for the animated musical she wrote for the child she hadn’t yet had (later taken from her by studio executives after four years), and the pitch-perfect ‘Will You Be My Trash Bag’, a surrogacy anthem that probably shouldn’t work as well as it does. She’s also wickedly funny about the adoption process where she is deemed unsuitable, in part, because of her Google footprint.

The show ends, as it must, with her son. Found through surrogacy and born when she was into her mid 40s, arriving within a fortnight alongside, somehow, everything else she’d been waiting for. The press night received a standing ovation, and rightly so. Dead Inside is the rare kind of show that breaks something open: taboos and the particular grief of a path to motherhood that doesn’t look like the brochure. The culmination of the show leaves you with a clear, cathartic feeling.

Dead Inside plays at Soho Theatre until Saturday 18 April. Tickets are available here.