Alan Ayckbourn enjoys challenging himself. That The Divide is a challenge which doesn’t come off is partly a matter of happenstance, partly Ayckbourn’s own undodgeable responsibility.

The former element principally concerns bad timing. It’s sheer ill luck that this play (or pair of plays, as it was then, with a total running time of over six hours) about a future dystopia which practises sexual apartheid – and, inevitably, institutionalised misogyny – should have premièred at last year’s Edinburgh International Festival mere weeks after the television adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood (an acknowledged influence here) provided such a coruscating vision of a broadly similar set-up. Ayckbourn sometimes trips over his own feet with merely gentle ribbing of his envisaged system’s absurdities and criticism which is more sentimental than scathing. Then to come to London (trimmed to a single evening and a whisker under four hours) amid the sea-change which #MeToo seems to be causing makes this treatment seem frankly trivial.

That is, as I say, a chain of misfortune. Where this master dramatist doesn’t help is by presenting such a protracted drama in such an undramatic form. He describes the piece as “a narrative for voices”, which might as he first wrote it have become a novel rather than a play. It consists principally of the diaries of a pair of children being brought up in the female part of a segregated community, Soween and her brother Elihu. Although matters break into dialogue and action, the spine of the work is “tell” rather than “show”. Again, there’s nothing wrong with using the storytelling format in theatre, but in this case there’s so much of it, on (what feels as if it ought to be) so heavy a subject, in so un-Ayckbournian an area, that you feel it needs to succeed distinctly or it won’t at all, and it does not succeed distinctly.

Unusually, Mr A has handed over the directorial reins on a première production: Annabel Bolton works her company well, and animates the set’s backdrop with graphics and animations by Ash J. Woodward. Erin Doherty’s performance as central character Soween – the superfluous corner of a love triangle which resolves into a Romeo-and-Juliet tragedy – is magnificent. Nevertheless, I’m afraid the keynote remains disappointment.

Written for the Financial Times.