This is the most impressively mature play by Ella Hickson that I have yet seen. However, that’s not to say it’s the best. And, at this point, TRIGGER WARNING: this review of a play about challenging the patriarchy may contain characteristically patriarchal – and, of course, entirely unintentional – misunderstanding and bias.

A young woman (Lara Rossi) climbs from the auditorium on to the bare stage; an older man (Samuel West) questions her. She’s ostensibly retrieving her bag which she left in the theatre after a performance, but in reality her purpose is to inveigh against the sexism and capitalist complacency of the work she has just seen, and in particular that of the director. The exchange is strident and tedious on both sides, and just when it seems to have nowhere left to go the parties exchange an actorly hug and move to chairs downstage along with the real writer and director (supposedly). It Was All Pretend. Mind you, the writer now gets, even less discreetly, the same contemptuous treatment from this director. And so on.

Blanche McIntyre’s deft production is metatheatrical as all get-out. There are domestic scenes, a poetic monologue, scenes which deconstruct others, scenes which seem to reprise earlier ones albeit from a different perspective. The constant themes are the casual oppression of women, and how creativity, power, autonomy, race, sexism, sexuality and the sex act itself can on occasion all be metaphors for or analogues of each other. Romola Garai effects a convincing emotional and intellectual journey in the title role, although it’s arguable whether the writer is an individual figure throughout, or a series of avatars of a general type.

The problem is that – particularly on press night, but to an extent on any performance at the Almeida – the reaction will predominantly be exactly that decried in the first scene: treating rage as entertainment. Worse, it will be simply indulged by many, and condemned by others, as theatre lampooning itself. It savours too much of navel-gazing. Many of us find such navels almost boundlessly fascinating, but nevertheless, as belly-buttons go, this one’s an innie: it doesn’t penetrate very far, and a disappointing amount of the substance in there turns out to be lint.

Written for the Financial Times.