The Female of the Species is destined to be remembered as the play that took the real-life incarceration of the writer Germaine Greer by a student and presented it as farce.

In Australian playwright Joanna Murray-Smith's version of events, the renowned Antipodean academic is called Margot Mason and is held to account by a gun-toting student who believes her life has been wrecked by the shifts and turns of the feminist's polemics.

Although Murray-Smith denies that Mason is intended to be Greer, the famous feminist is incensed and condemned a script she appeared not to have read as "threadbare", criticising its creator as an "insane reactionary".

Whether or not you read Mason as Greer, I have no sympathy. Those who dish the dirt must expect to take it. In a memorable spat, Greer once resorted to attacking columnist Suzanne Moore for her "fuck-me shoes" - a low jibe - and she has poured vitriol on victims from Bob Dylan to Princess Diana. It's how she earns her shilling and if others make her their subject matter in return, so be it.

Greer can certainly be as trying as Mason (wonderfully depicted by Eileen Atkins). My own experience was of a heart-stopping encounter when I agreed to interview her at a literary festival. She would take no calls to discuss the event beforehand then arrived to demand written-questions from the floor, prompting a scramble for pens and paper. She, of course, performed effortlessly, winning storming applause for her star turn. The organisers and I were nervous wrecks and my rapid re-reading of Greer's seminal texts had been a waste of time.

No matter. The bigger concern is that this play warrants serious dissection. It does have some witty lines, even if I was the only one giggling at the notion of Jacques Derrida feeding Margot's daughter solids.

But it squanders the fascinating subject of how accountable an author is for his or her writings. The aggrieved student's mother, we learn, killed herself in accordance with a particular Margot Mason school of thought that the writer subsequently retracted. That's a serious notion which receives scarcely a moment's analysis in the slap-about.

Greer is, by chance, right in thinking Murray-Smith reactionary. We are clearly supposed to warm to her salt-of-the-earth cabbie who proclaims that women don't really want equal, domesticatedpartners. Perhaps the women of Murray-Smith's homeland are still lusting after Neanderthals but give me a break. It's the kind of nonsense that created feminists.

Germaine Greer may be impossible, ridiculous and contrary but she can also be an incisive critic. She should see the play - and demolish it properly.

Until 4 October. Box office: 0870 8900511.