Women, wrote the 19th-century social psychologist Gustave Le Bon, “represent the most inferior forms of human evolution”. Intelligent females exist, but they are “as exceptional as the birth of any monstrosity, as, for example, a gorilla with two heads”. Bryony Lavery’s brilliant 1984 drama refutes such misogynistic patriarchy with force, warmth and elegant wit. And, in Tom Littler’s lucid production, which marks the 150th anniversary of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, it is extraordinarily moving.

Lavery posits a passionate feminist interpretation of evolutionary theory, but this is no crude polemic. Instead, it’s a vivid fantasia in which, on New Year’s Eve, Molly (Marjorie Yates), an archaeologist and self-styled “batty old crone”, describes how she met her ancient ancestor in the Olduvai Gorge of Tanganyika. Time is twisted and looped in on itself by a narrative in which Molly unearths female remains, only to find their owner (Clare-Hope Ashitey, pictured with Yates) very much alive. Exhilarated, Molly takes the woman back to her Yorkshire home, calls her Victoria and sets about teaching her everything she knows.

The ideas Lavery juggles include cultural colonialism as well as the tension between faith and art on one hand and science on the other. In laying the blame for rapacious progress that could lead to humanity’s self-destruction so squarely at the feet of men Lavery falters, her gender politics over-simplified.

Otherwise, her ingenuity and erudition are dazzling. Molly’s first gift to Victoria, whose name has imperialist connotations, is an Edenic apple. The process of education proves two-way: Molly snorts at learned works that discuss evolution in exclusively masculine terms (the history of “mankind”), but even she is shocked when Victoria painstakingly explains, in her newly acquired language, that it was woman, not man, who discovered fire.

Littler responds to the writing’s richness with a production of succulent density. In Victoria Johnstone’s design Molly’s sitting room is a cosy den built on African soil, where Christmas lights are draped over skulls and weighty tomes. And the performances are full of flavoursome detail, the relationship between Yates’s brisk, kindly, clever Molly and Ashitey’s mercurial Victoria fluid and absorbing as Molly prepares Victoria to go out into the dangerous, thrilling modern world she has inherited.

A work of intricate imagination, immaculately delivered.

Box office 020-7503 1646, to Nov 21

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