GERMAINE GREER has given publicity that money can’t buy to Joanna Murray-Smith’s comedy, first seen in Australia. The play is inspired by a real incident when the feminist guru-turned-Grumpy Old Woman was held hostage in her home by a deranged student. Without having seen it, Greer has denounced the work as “threadbare” and the playwright as “an insane reactionary who boasts that she has not read a single feminist text”.

Strictly speaking, the central character of Margot Mason, played by Eileen Atkins, is too English to be Greer. But after such a loud public spat it’s hard not to have a chuckle at the Celebrity Big Brother drop-out’s expense.

Margot is the ego-maniac author of best-sellers such as Madame Ovary, Ugly Cheating Bastards and The Cerebral Vagina, whose diktats to her followers are apt to undergo 180-degree revolutions. Draw your own comparisons with the author of The Female Eunuch. But the character is little more than a cardboard cut-out monster and the joke wears thin pretty quickly. When Anna Maxwell Martin turns up as stalker Molly, the idea of playing a real-life abduction for laughs really does seem in poor taste.

Fortunately we turn away from Greer’s life when Sophie Thompson enters with a riotous performance as Margot’s rebelliously conventional daughter, pushed into insanity by domestic drudgery. But three male arrivals, trooping through the French windows like an Alan Ayckbourn curtain-call, stretch credulity, and Margot’s final conversion doesn’t seem to convince Dame Eileen any more than it did me.

Murray-Smith does not seem sure whether she is attempting a serious engagement with changing attitudes to feminism or a battle-of-the-sexes knockabout. She can write comedy but too many of the gags are lame or clichéd.

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