The Woman Who Cooked Her Husband, New Ambassador's Theatre, London

This half-baked piece of writing and directing leaves bad taste in the mouth

In one of the few good lines in The Woman Who Cooked Her Husband, Alison Steadman, speaking with phoney fondness of her ex, smiles and says: "When he cracked a joke, he laughed louder than anyone else.'' Even that slight degree of irony is rare, however, in Debbie Isitt's play, which she has directed as well as written – or as badly. Ostensibly a comedy, it merely drags us through an affair, divorce, and remarriage with dialogue as banal as it is distasteful.

Hilary, Kenneth's former wife, has invited him and his new wife, Laura, to dinner at her lovely home, where everything, like the actors' costumes, is scarlet or avocado. Laura is there under protest ("It's not normal!") but Ken is eager for a good, free meal, Laura being hot stuff in the sack but useless at the stove. The play then flashes back to show us Ken carrying on with Laura while married to Hilary. There's a film of him racing between the two women, having trouble getting his zip up and his car started. Ken repeatedly arrives home late with no explanation, and when Hilary voices her suspicions, tells her she's stupid or drunk or insane. Finally, Laura breaks the bad news, Hilary throws Ken out, and Laura takes him on.

Ken's language is a blunt instrument of mayhem. "You couldn't attract anyone any more," he tells Hilary. "You've lost all your looks. You're old." Hilary's is less deadly but, with its whiny repetition, also terminally tedious. "I'm left alone with nothing to show for it after all these years of being a good wife." Laura is not quite as dull, partly because the role of the other woman has a smaller stock of cliches to draw on, partly because Isitt has given her some unpredictable lines to convey her dizzy sweetness. Horrified that her new marriage is already falling apart, she says earnestly to Ken, "Let's think of the starving in Africa and stop feeling sorry for ourselves."

Though each woman is shown as, in her way, admirable, Ken's being an out-and-out bastard makes the play less of a drama than a two-hour harangue. In the final scene we are back in Hilary's kitchen, where Ken chokes on a fish bone, and both wives stand by and watch him croak. Frightened that they will be charged with murder (why?), Laura happily falls in with Hilary's plan of cooking Ken and eating him, and the play presents this as a feminist triumph.

It's possible to make this idea humorous, even witty – Lord Dunsany managed it in his famous short story "The Two Bottles of Relish" – but the treatment here is as unpalatable as one would expect Ken to be. Despite the grinding realism of the dialogue, the play is set, confusingly, in a world as artificial as the lurid lighting. Ken, who's in his fifties, wears a teddy-boy coat and haircut, and Hilary and Laura mambo around their houses to Rosemary Clooney records. Yet Laura is plainly a woman of today. The stylised milieu might be designed to distract from the cliches, but it merely accentuates them.

Alison Steadman does her droll-housewife turn as Hilary, looking, in her smugness, as if she's already cooked and eaten a very large canary. Michael Attwell makes himself deeply unattractive but never suggests why a pretty, confident young girl should go for him. But Daisy Donovan as Laura is charming, throwing herself into a dance of ferocious imbecility and staring at Ken with amused disbelief when he tells her that, because she's a woman, she must know how to cook.