First Night: My Brilliant Divorce, Apollo Theatre, London

Only stale, lame jokes dawn on French's feeble comedy

Hard to think that even Dawn French's greatest fans – the ones who pay full price for their tickets – won't feel cheated by this string of stale, lame jokes untouched by an iota of character or conviction. Unless wrought up to undiscriminating hysteria by hen-party bravado and Bacardis, wouldn't they find the unrelenting tone of sardonic self-pity wearying, the humour lazy to the point of contempt?

French doesn't expend any effort on establishing a character or making herself appealing to the audience – she's Dawn French, after all. No, she merely tells us that she is Angela Kennedy Lipsky, and that her husband has just walked out. The cause is a Mexican bimbo so thin she might be suffering from what the cleaning lady calls "anorak nervosa".

Angela's mother, who has an accent out of Father Ted, blames her for the split, and her grown daughter, equally unsympathetic, takes off with a boyfriend. Most of Angela's friends also desert her, but one of them points out the advantages of the single life – the toilet seat's always down and you get control of the remote. "After decades of being a wife and a mother," Angela plaintively tells us, "I no longer had a role in life."

But Angela has no trouble filling her time. She goes on holiday to a resort where she's the only person not on honeymoon; she visits a sex shop, where her eyes and mouth grow wider at the increasing size of vibrators; she answers a lonely-hearts ad from a man who turns out to be (you'll never guess) unattractive. Each activity is a cue for self-deprecation and everybody-else deprecation, expressed in juvenile sarcasm, nasty smiles and anguished grimaces. Seemingly for the first time, she gets a job, behind the counter for the local chemist, whom she catches masturbating. The other shopgirl tells her, "I always told you he was a wanker."

The playwright Geraldine Aron is credited, if that's the right word, for writing this, but surely French just pulled some old sex and marriage gags out of an old file. One minute she's speaking in her usual persona, the next she's reciting a stilted line such as the following, when she visits her GP suspecting rectal cancer: "I felt my face flush redder than any beetroot when I remembered the great jarful of them I had eaten the night before."

The distinguished director Garry Hynes is, apparently, also involved. Was it her idea to have French mime unsuccessful intercourse by jerking her torso back and forth and popping her eyes? All three women should be ashamed of themselves for this feeble and tasteless exercise, which appeals to the worst in women, and which makes us look bad too.