For almost all of its length, The Female of the Species is hilarious. To be sure, it is merely a farce – a lesser form that isn’t to everyone’s taste. But it’s a superb example of that form, superior to anything Alan Ayckbourn has written in recent years, and laced with deft and devastating satire. The audience laughed almost continuously for the full 100 minutes before cheerfully leaving for an early supper.

It isn’t clear if the critics who refuse to find the play funny are simply being loyal to Ms Greer or if they are keen to prove their right-on feminist bona fides. Both reactions are unnecessary. The play didn’t make me think any less of Ms Greer or her work (although her reaction to the play did), and only someone steeped in political correctness could take offense at its jokes. Indeed, one of the rare pleasures of The Female of the Species is the way it plays fair with all sides. Murray-Smith deftly pokes holes in every position – feminist, post-­feminist, old-­fashioned sexist or just plain confused about the gender wars – represented by her characters. Yet at the same time she allows them some dignity; there’s a humaneness and generosity at work in the play that you don’t often find in either satire or plays about ideas.

It’s telling that the angrier critics somehow failed to notice that the play isn’t in the least “reactionary”. Murray-Smith isn’t saying that women shouldn’t be in the workplace or receive equal pay for equal work. She isn’t claiming that sexism doesn’t exist. She just doesn’t have much time for all those gloriously solipsistic feminist writers who make grand pronouncements about women and society based only or mostly on their own lives, who condemn the “male gaze” but ruthlessly exploit their own sex appeal to get ahead.

Reading the critical response carefully, you begin to wonder if the real problem with this play is that its satire is directed incorrectly: Murray-Smith has simply made fun of the wrong targets. One doesn’t want to use the term “sacred cow” but it seems that it’s not appropriate to make fun of Germaine Greer, or feminism of a certain kind, or celebrity intellectuals, or even writers in general.