The Authorised Ella Hickson

Grid Iron's recent reputation has been won through the development of intriguingly site-responsive theatre: Ella Hickson is emerging as one of the most exciting playwrights of her generation. The Authorised Kate Bane is self-reflective and, despite the emotional confusion and conflict at the centre of the script, acts as a meditation on the relationship between an artist and her work.

Kate Bane, the heroine who confronts both her family history and anxiety about marriage over the space of a mere twenty four hours, is an author avatar for Hickson: a computer sits at the centre of the stage, and Bane even sits at it to rewrite certain conversations. The final scene, which plays too much like a renunciation of the play's earlier engagement with familial conflict, emphasises the unreality of theatre and offers a vision of life far more palatable than the determined narratives of drama.

Jenny Hulse is a capable actress - most recently, she was confusing the roles of victim and master in Vanishing Point's Wonderland - and she excels in a nuanced performance of the heroine. Switching from confident artist to insecure child, her Kate Bane convincingly unravels the mysterious power of the parent to reduce an adult back to childhood: that Bane is so ready to fall into the part, and identifies childhood as the last chance for an instinctive and happy life, before the horror of self-consciousness destroys both, goes some way to explain this strange and familiar devolution. Hickson not only clearly delineates the generational conflict - mistaken by Bane for class conflict - but goes some way to examine the child's complicity into their oppression.

Her mother, performed with aplomb by Anne Kidd, is a caricature: the former liberated woman who, having escaped marriage turns life into an endless sexual and geographical odyssey; equally, daddy Ike is two dimensional if sympathetic. Along with prospect husband Albin, the rest of the cast are set up to focus on Bane's progress. Albin is inconsistent - one moment a rationalist dispensing words of scientific wisdom, the next drawn helplessly into an unpleasant argument.

Yet the lightness of their characterisation is deliberate, drawing attention to the central conflict which, ultimately, is not between Bane and her parents, or the competing versions of marriage expressed in the play, or between Bane's childhood safety and the responsibilities of being adult. It is about the battle between Bane the character and Hickson the author, and how art feeds on reality.

The end is unsatisfying: having set up fascinating studies of the importance of emotion in memories, a woman's battle to remain free but also to love and the impact of parenting on identity, the finale is a cheap version of Priestly's An Inspector Calls, and cancels out many of the conflicts by effectively consigning them to fiction. Hickson's interesting programme notes state that she is intrigued by "authenticity." Unfortunately the more authentic reflections on Hickson's life mar a brilliant, intelligent script and make it self-indulgent where it could be incisive.