It comes as a shock to walk into the theatre and be confronted by a sumptuous hotel suite complete with champagne flutes and roses. This is the kind of set that once would have got a welcoming round of applause in Shaftesbury Avenue. In the end, however, it seems appropriate for a debut play by the actor and comedian Katy Brand that, while not without fierce emotional confrontations, is more likely to reassure than to radicalise its audience.
Brand’s aim is to explore the dilemmas facing women today and shows three generations of one family meeting up on the eve of a wedding. The 40-year-old bride-to-be is Suzanne whose ambitions were thwarted by a teenage pregnancy and who is now about to marry a reliable suburbanite. Her happiness is constantly undermined by her mother, Eleanor, a vinegary lush filled with anger over her own failure to fulfil her intellectual potential. Completing the triangle is Suzanne’s daughter, Laurie, who brims with bright-eyed idealism, takes sex as it comes and envisages a future in which babies will be produced in artificial wombs.
The play is at its most vivid when Eleanor and Suzanne are locking horns. This is a plausibly poisonous mother-daughter relationship in which the resentment of an older generation towards its successor manifests itself in barbed recriminations. Where the play falls down is in its portrait of Laurie: she seems less like a real person than a box-ticking assembly of everything the young allegedly preach and practise, even down to her virtual dating with a gender-transitioning Canadian. Having sharply and convincingly explored intergenerational tensions, Brand also resolves everything far too glibly.
She is, however, well served by Michael Yale’s production and by her cast. Anita Dobson is memorably spruce and waspish as the tart-tongued Eleanor who seems pickled in self-loathing; Debbie Chazen captures the warmth of Suzanne, who has comfortably settled for less, and Maisie Richardson-Sellers does all she can as the unlikely Laurie. Oliver Greenall, as a singularly obliging waiter who pops in to serve the women, proves himself to be a cunning linguist.
• At Trafalgar Studios 2, London, until 9 June. Box office: 0844 871 7632.