Germaine Greer once trod on my toes at a party. And her feet are not the daintiest. But I bear no grudge. She apologised charmingly, and it’s quite something to have been stood on by the leading feminist of the age. Some men might even find that sort of thing rather exciting.

Metaphorically, Greer has stood on many more toes in her time, and indeed ground not a few into metatarsal powder. Ten years after her death, Princess Diana was dismissed by Greer as a “devious moron” (though is a devious moron an oxymoron? Discuss).

Now she comes in for some flak herself, as the model for the principal character, Margot Mason, in the Australian Joanna Murray-Smith’s new play, The Female of the Species. And, apparently, she is furious about it. The author, Greer says, is an “insane reactionary”. She shouldn’t worry too much. If the piece is indeed an assault on her life and work, then it’s about as devastating as being beaten about the head with a balloon.

Greer’s other complaint is that Murray-Smith has taken a traumatic episode from her life, when a female student broke into her home and tied her up for several hours, and turned it into a broad comedy. She may have more of a point here, though, as a public figure, especially one who agreed to go on Celebrity Big Brother (then walked off in moral outrage, only to appear later on both Big Brother’s Little Brother and Big Brother’s Big Mouth), it’s surely a risk you take.

What nobody seems to have pointed out is that Murray-Smith has also depicted the unstable and vulnerable female student — who has since had psychiatric treatment, has never sought publicity and is in no position to answer back — and turned her into a broadly comic and ridiculous figure too. Equally unappealing is Murray-Smith’s weaselly insistence that The Female of the Species is “not a character portrait of Greer”. Oh yes it is.

All this fuss over a play that can safely be filed under the “middle-of-the-road to mildly disappointing” category: fitfully amusing, but often reminiscent of a particularly feeble sitcom. “The world’s your lobster,” one character says. “Oyster,” corrects another. “No thanks, not now.” Ho, ho.

Eileen Atkins is dressed and coiffured to look eerily like Greer, though she stops short of an Australian émigré drawl. Her Margot Mason is an iconic feminist battle-axe, touchy, vain, intellectually bullying, an aimless provocateur given to grandstanding statements such as “procreation is genetic masturbation” and the author of seminal works such as The Cerebral Vagina, Madame Ovary and Men Are Awful. She nurses numerous pet hatreds that in a man would simply mean he was an old curmudgeon: chick lit, the internet and so on. Like many feminists, though, what she really hates is other women, especially other feminists: Naomi Big-Hair, Paglia the “intellectual porn star” and all those others, Faludi, Fallaci, who “sound like types of pasta”.

Anna Maxwell Martin plays Molly, the disturbed girl student, in a too-small anorak, scruffy rucksack and pudding-basin haircut. Her mother, we learn, abandoned her as a baby to pursue her feminist destiny and ended up throwing herself under a train, clutching a copy of The Cerebral Vagina.

Maxwell Martin overacts to comic though unsubtle effect, as do the rest of the cast apart from Atkins, which merely adds to the sensation that you’re watching a mediocre, only sporadically funny television sitcom mysteriously transferred to a West End stage. Sophie Thompson acts the part of Tess, Mason’s estranged and damaged daughter, even more wildly, as does Sam Kelly as her fat, camp publisher. You can only conclude that this is how the director, Roger Michell, wanted it.

Meanwhile, we’re left with Atkins shamefully underused, silent for long stretches of the play (Germaine Greer, silent?) and handcuffed to the kitchen table in the corner while the other characters accumulate around her and recount their problems, all of them in some way due to Mason and the feminist revolution. Frank the taxi driver is a rugged neanderthal who tried to become a new man, took up baking and talked endlessly about his feelings to his wife, only to find that she didn’t fancy him any more. While Bryan, Tess’s husband, is tubby, devoted, decent, empathetic — and, it is strongly suggested, somewhat lacking in the trouser department. These are not the most nuanced of roles.

There are times when this play looks as if it might become a more involving debate about the battle of the sexes, intellectual responsibility, freedom of choice and the danger of favouring ideological simplicity over human complexity. Yet the debates invariably fizzle out into weak comedy, the jokes enacted with crude obviousness, double underlining and triple exclamation marks!!!

Greer herself has derided the play as “threadbare”. On that, at least, she’s about right.

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