PATRICK MARMION: Michelle Dockery commands the stage like an avenging Reverend Mother - as she becomes the latest star to join Bloodsport

Bloodsport

Rating: Four stars

Rating:

Downton Abbey's Michelle Dockery is the latest star to join Ava Pickett's mission to expose, expunge, and excoriate the misery of misogyny in all of history. And in this unfettered new vision of Helen Of Troy, she has a lot of caustic fun.

Pickett is the playwright whose debut play 1536 was picked up by Islington's Almeida Theatre, before transferring to the West End this year, with Barbie actor Margot Robbie as a producer. A gutsy assault on patriarchy in Tudor England, written in profane modern vernacular, Robbie claimed 1536 was the best play she'd ever read.

Now Pickett has wound back the clock to ancient Greece. But Pickett is no student of the classical world. Historical realities are not her concern: Freewheeling anachronism is once again her weapon of choice. Her take on the story of she-who-launched-a-thousand-ships could easily be titled Helen of Essex, or The Only Way Is Troy.

It's a world strongly reminiscent of Martina Cole's gangster novels, but there's also a touch of Steven Berkoff's relish for the poetry of the obscene. 

In a world engulfed by civil war, we're put in mind of Tommy Robinson and his thugs, Greek warrior Agamemnon, who is renamed Mario, returns home in triumph after recovering his brother's wayward wife Helen (Dockery), blamed for triggering the ten-year war.

Dockery enters Mario's designer pad, wearing silk lingerie still spattered in blood from the rescue operation that took place just off the M25. 

It's champagne and mozzarella sticks all-round until Mario and brother Marcus head to the pub. 

Dockery seizes her moment, reconnecting with Mario's wife, Cee (Laura Aikman) - her old sparring partner when out on the lash in the days before she eloped with pretty boy, Paris. She denies ever having shagged him in the toilet: 'It was the cloakroom'.

Greek myth is eagerly exploited by Pickett to turbo-charge the battle of the sexes, as Dockery's Helen tries to redeem her reputation. 

That objective is a little bit vague, but doesn't stop Dockery commanding the stage like an avenging Reverend Mother – having swapped her negligée for black battle fatigues. 

Like her Lady Mary in Downton, she's an alpha female with a social conscience and a long hard stare.

To honour the sisterhood she has to bust the myths and fix her relationship with Aikman's Cee, who soon ceases to be a stereotypical trophy wife teetering in red stilettos. 

But Helen's mission is compromised by the return of her own guilty secret – her hilariously sharp, now pregnant teenage daughter, Hermione (Emma Monnickendam), who she abandoned as a child. 

Yet they're all blindsided by militant revolutionary feminist Dani (Maimuna Memon).

For all its invigorating and tooled-up sorority, what I love about Pickett's writing is the pleasure she also takes in her sometimes brutal, sometimes vacillating men - including Gerard Monaco's Mario, a Grade 1 Andrew Tate style misogynist. 

Even better is Ethan Moorhouse's storytelling chorus character who sets the scene and gives us the unfiltered view from the Essex pub and car park, where he sees England as 'six pints in and spoiling for a fight'.