Alma Mater at the Almeida Theatre review: Justine Mitchell's heroic last-minute substitution can't save a problematic play

I’d love to report that the belated opening of Kendall Feaver’s drama about the politics of sexual assault in an unnamed Oxford college is a triumph over adversity, but I can’t.

The splendid Justine Mitchell stepped in to play feisty academic Jo Mulligan, the institution’s “first female master”, after the 11th-hour withdrawal of Lia Williams due to illness two weeks ago.

Mitchell is riveting, even with a script in her hand at the press performance, and the issues the play raises are urgent. Unfortunately, it’s utterly schematic in its provocative both-sidesing of every argument raised. Plot dictates character throughout.

Designer Vicki Mortimer gives us a rectangle of benches – a lecture hall as boxing ring – and Polly Findlay’s halting production duly feels like a series of attacks and retaliations. And even though the setting is meant to be emblematic of problems throughout the educational spectrum, this is still another bloody play about bloody Oxbridge.

Mitchell’s Jo is a former foreign correspondent who drinks with her students, uses the C-word in academic addresses and is generally supposed to blow fresh air through the fusty institution where she studied years before.

But having fought hard battles in the Eighties, especially after the unsolved murder on campus of a female contemporary, she’s dismissive of the luxury fourth-wave feminism of her students, embodied by earnest, mixed-heritage but highly privileged Nikki (Phoebe Campbell).

When Welsh first-year Paige (Liv Hill) wakes from a drunken sexual encounter she has no memory of, Nikki claims a dominant “rape culture” is to blame. Nit-picking over semantics, Jo alienates the younger women.

Nikki puts Paige’s identifiable story online and is deluged with anonymous #MeToo stories. And abuse. The Everyone’s Invited forum, which exposed abuse in private schools and leading universities, is a clear inspiration.

But was this a rape or a drunken tryst later regretted? What about the boy, a “promising athlete”, who also has no memory of the alleged assault? Who is to blame, and is Jo’s failure to sign a mea culpa on behalf of her alma mater a cancelling offence?

Oh, by the way, Jo’s best friend is an Iranian scientist (Nathalie Armin), married to complacent, poetry-spouting Michael (Nathaniel Parker), who is Jo’s former tutor and lover and now chair of the college.

There’s a kernel of thought here about consent and responsibility in an age where everyone is exposed online. But it’s undermined by Feaver’s desire to constantly wrong-foot the audience and cover every base. Think this is about assault? No, it’s about race. No, privilege. No, the power-dynamics of student-teacher relationships. No, the internal fault-lines of feminism.

A fine cast is defeated by hairpin character turns that make no sense whatsoever. Mitchell blasts forcefully through the inconsistencies but this play would have been problematic even without losing its leading actress at the last minute.

Almeida Theatre, to 20 July; almeida.co.uk