Studio II: Origin of the Species

It's billed as a Darwin rewrite but iBryony Lavery's 1984, oddball two-hander is nothing of the sort. It's infinitely less concerned with rewiring humanity's history than with redirecting our future down a feminine track. Heralding this long-overdue gender shift is Molly, an ageing Yorkshire archaeologist, explaining life on earth with her diary and geology with the aid of a layer cake. She's driven to retell our collective tale since, on a recent dig in Africa's Olduvai Gorge, she unearthed a four-million-year-old mummy, brought her to life with a kiss and smuggled her to the moors to kick-start humanity again, minus all the maleness, mutilation and wars.

'Victoria' starts off sniffing the lampshades, but it's a matter of stage minutes before she's debating the uses of imagination and singing 'Ilkley Moor Bar Tat' to harmonium accompaniment. Marjorie Yates is a delightfully doughty Molly, leading Clare-Hope Ashitey's beguiling Victoria towards an inexorable, feminist independence. They make a winning odd couple, quarrelling over the Quality Street and gingerly interpreting Molly's first drawing - of how she once cracked open her mother's skull. But director Tom Littler's production is too straightforward and sentimental to handle Lavery's weirder flights of evolutionary fancy, and the script is less fulfilling than its premise makes it sound. Missing a vital interpretive link, Lavery's elegant, sweetly comic play asks many more nagging questions than it answers about womanhood, pre-history and the possibility of a humanity without science.