Let’s face it, realising you’ve sat down to a ‘rehearsed reading’ rather than an actual play just as the lights are dimming isn’t exactly a promise for amazing things to come, especially when this realisation is accompanied by the reading of a long-winded hand-out explaining the cast's intention to confront the “discrimination faced by female actors on stage”. And yet, the cast of Yellow Cup Theatre actually achieve what few theatre companies, it seems, can – a suspension of reality which transports the audience straight into the living room of Kate and Madz, the mismatched, unwilling (in the case of the latter) roomies, and their equally unwilling (also in the case of the latter) houseguests – Natasha and Clare.

The dialogue is funny, fast-paced and oh-so familiar to any member of the female sex who has sat around a bottle of rosé getting steadily more inebriated in at times hilarious, at times awkward company. There were moments when the play was  a bit repetitive, but the subtlety with which the point clé of the slightly alternate universe in which the play is set emerges – that the characters are living in a society where all women are forced to have a contraceptive implant and must work their way up a scoring system to ‘deserve’ the right to a child – is truly commendable. It doesn’t feel forced, it doesn’t feel clichéd, and the revelation is refreshingly unexpected. Mary Galloway steals the show with her representation of a neurotic, stereotypically empty-headed posh totty with a Daddy who ‘bought half of England’ and a penchant for salsa dancing and tequila.

However, this, for me, was where the weakness of the plot lay – the stereotype. For all the pages of angry feminist statistic-flaunting and the ‘we’re sick of being typecast’ actors’ speech at the beginning of the reading, it is surprising just how many stereotypes are present in the play: the rich, posh, vacuous Daddy’s girl; the highly opinionated, at times ‘vulgar’ lesbian; even the very premise of the play is of a group of girls bitching about each other and  other girls, drinking rosé and dancing to crappy music. The auditorium rang with laughter, but does this play really achieve what it boldly claims to – challenging the stereotyped roles handed out to female actors? Perhaps the full version of the play, due out “hopefully next term”, will prove me wrong. I know I’ll be there to find out.