There is plenty of zingy comedy in this paly by the American writer Susan Glaspell, but by the end of Kate Saxon's revival - the first since its 1922 New York premiere - its most striking attribute is anger. Written in response to the Comstock Law, which prevented the circulation of information on birth control, the drama deals with the tension between moral and social expectations and the desire for freedom, as seen through a poet's dual relationship with his loyal wife and with a free-thinking birth-control activist. It's brilliantly witty and biting, cutting to the core of perceptions of femininity.

With his smart liberal New York friends, Seymore Standish presents himself as an artist, whose poetry would be brilliant, he claims, if only he wasn't saddled with his mother and his bourgeois wife and children, whom he supports by working as the director of a bank.

Back home in the conservative Midwest, though, the scene isn't quite as he has painted it. His wife, Diantha, whom he patronisingly calls Dotty Dimple, is far from small-minded, as is his mother, who makes rag dolls that are less benign than they appear. When the dynamic Nora Powers arrives, armed with promotional material on birth control, stifled Diantha scents the possibility of an exciting new life. The horrified Seymore, who nurses unconsummated passions for Nora but loathes the effect she has on his wife, is exposed as a snobbish hypocrite.

Glaspell packs her writing with telling motifs, from the portrait of the Madonna on the Standishes' living-room wall to Mrs Standish's dolls, which are in fact slyly satirical portraits of their neighbours and, in one case, of Seymore himself. The name Nora Powers has connotations of Ibsen and of puissance; and when Diantha follows Nora's lead and bobs her hair, she is performing a potent act of feminist subversion.

That Glaspell ends the play not with neat resolution, but with a sour twist, shows a bracing realism: she was clearly under no illusions about how far the struggle for equality still had to go.

Saxon's production is initially a little slow, but once it hits its stride it is exhilarating, with fine performances from Ruth Everett as the effervescent Nora, David Annen as the well-meaning but heedlessly self-interested Seymore and Katie McGuinness as a fresh-faced, agonisingly divided Dotty. Coruscating.

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