Is the bellicose, foul-mouthed, cynical, smug, self-infatuated, envious, hypocritical, boastful but perhaps inwardly vulnerable feminist writer played by Eileen Atkins in The Female of the Species really a disguised portrait of Germaine Greer? Her fellow Australian Joanna Murray-Smith says no, and she should know, since she wrote the play. But Greer herself has publicly said yes, and, though I’m not sure she should have gone on to call the dramatist “an insane reactionary”, I wouldn’t dare disagree with her.

This Antipodean feud clearly has legs, and promises to become more fun than the play, which is a sub-Shavian comedy or, at times, farce on feminist themes. Though invited, Greer wasn’t at Roger Michell’s production last night, and, had she been, might well have been enraged enough to dismember a few applauding spectators. So let’s hope she makes it to the Vaudeville soon.

By Murray-Smith’s admission the play’s opening, if nothing else, was inspired by the incident in 2000 when an idolatrous student assailed Greer in her sitting room, grabbing her legs and yelling “mummy, mummy”. But, in the play, Dame Eileen’s Margot is waylaid by a disillusioned ex-student, Anna Maxwell Martin’s Molly. She professes undying admiration for Margot’s work, then exposes its inconsistencies, then accuses the feminist guru of having destroyed the rejecting mother who committed suicide clutching a copy of Margot’s The Cerebral Vagina.

Adding that she’s had herself neutered so as to avoid the alleged miseries of motherhood, the girl brandishes a gun, handcuffs Margot and vows to murder her.

Obviously she holds back, allowing us to see more Atkins, which is always a joy, and more play, which isn’t always.

Despite the shooter, new characters enter, remain and join the discourse. Sophie Thompson jabbers and gibbers about as Tess, Margot’s despised daughter, who has run from the marital home, exhausted by children and chores. Paul Chahidi is her husband, a drab bloke desperately trying to be all-understanding and all-helpful. And (don’t ask me why) we also get Con O’Neill as a taxi driver who decides to ditch new-man pretences and reinvent himself as a caveman: a change that Thompson’s Tess excitedly welcomes.

I must admit that I laughed at some genuinely amusing lines, while acknowledging that the debate isn’t all that trenchant and the play is unworthy of Atkins, though she’s as brusquely abrasive as her role demands. Insofar as Murray-Smith has an overall point, it is that old-style feminism distorted and damaged lives. But she undermines her serious aims with lines like (from Margot) “Who hasn’t been sexually molested? I know women who have been in therapy because they weren’t sexually molested.” That’s cheap, cheesy and, let’s agree, pretty unGreer.

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