Blurred Lines, National Theatre Shed, review In November 2012 Nick Payne, then aged 28, became the youngest playwright to win an Evening Standard Theatre Award, for Constellations. Earlier that year, Jake Gyllenhaal had starred in a New York production of Payne's first play, If There Is I Haven't Found It Yet. One way and another, he had some grounds, you might think, for self-satisfaction. Yet in a recent Telegraph interview he admitted that a notice accusing him of gender stereotyping in his play Wanderlust troubled him so much that he turned to The Equality Illusion (2010), a book by the feminist activist Kat Banyard. There he found the seeds of his latest drama, whose title is borrowed from Robin Thicke's hit anthem of glossy sexual menace. Set on a cruelly precipitous translucent staircase, with Lucy Carter's wittily abstract lighting providing the settings, the piece - jointly created by Payne, his director, Carrie Cracknell, and the eight-strong cast - consists of a succession of vivid narrative vignettes. Michaela Coel plays a young black actress desperate to launch her career by playing even the most stultifyingly stereotyped roles. Claire Skinner is a working mother trapped in nightmare meeting with her male line manager (Ruth Skinner) and a female head of PR (Bryony Hannah). Lorna Brown and Susannah Vine take the roles of a couple wrangling miserably about the man's use of prostitutes. The vignettes are pointedly punctuated with songs, including The Crystals" ineffable "He hit me (it felt like a kiss) " and Tammy Wynette's rousing "Don't Liberate Me." The fact that permission to perform Thicke's ditty was denied is announced with a grim flourish. The writing is witty, the direction elegant, the performances sharply observed, the issues raised of pressing importance, and the play as a whole has great charm. Yet I left the theatre in a state of keen anxiety about its depiction of women. In almost every vignette, the implication was that women feel themselves to be voiceless victims. In the final scene, of a chat show featuring a male director and a pretty young actress, the expression "Oxbridge bollocks" is used, as though articulacy were itself somehow anti-feminist, and the final triumphant flourish has women walking away from the discussion as though refusal to engage in dialogue represented a victory. But Payne and Cracknell must surely have intended this piece to begin a necessary conversation. If that was what they wanted, they've got a success on their hands.