Last year the National Theatre, that great stalwart of British theatre, celebrated its 50th anniversary with, among other things, a highly-publicised, highly-praised televised retrospective of its more memorable moments. While most bloggers took to their keyboards in admiration of everyone from Benedict Cumberbatch to Dominic Cooper, one theatre critic, Catherine Love, was quick to lament the distinct lack of women in the line- up – just one writer out of the 50 on the show was female.

This remarkable dearth is neither a new nor a minor phenomenon. Following Love’s outcry, it emerged that for the National to achieve equal gender representation among writers by their centenary, the Olivier stage would be able to offer up only one piece of male writing every eight years.

If that doesn’t put things into perspective, a few more figures might. Under the 15-year leadership of Peter Hall, the National staged just four plays written by women; Trevor Nunn’s five-year stint did little to improve this. Even with the appointment of Josie Rourke to the Donmar Warehouse, only four plays by female writers were produced in 13 years.

Unfortunately, Cambridge’s beloved ADC is no exception to this seemingly inescapable pattern. The run of Hellie Cranney and Ellen Roberston’s all-female published, produced and performed The Other Line next week will mark only the seventh production penned by women in eleven years.

Three of these were put on this term, part of a tangible backlash to Michaelmas’s noticeably testosterone-heavy termcard – both on stage and behind the page – including Frost/Nixon, Glengarry Ross and The History Boys. This male dominance was exacerbated by the more usual productions of Shakespeare, who, as we are all well aware, isn’t known for being too friendly to the females.

All the worse, then, given the plethora of female talent to be found here. Roberston, who has just finished her stint as the director of Jessica Swale’s Blue Stockings, reckoned that over their two-day audition period, she must have seen almost 100 women to just 20 men try out, with no marked difference in the level of talent either.

Director Emily Burns recounts a confessional conversation with a member of the ADC programming committee, who declared that if they heard one more theatrical pitch touting how great their play was for women they’d shoot themselves. The whole cast is, however, delighted with this new predicament, seeing it as just another part of their “collective responsibility” to recognise and redeem this theatre’s gender imbalance.

The Other Line is undoubtedly a response to this scarcity of the female body on and off the stage. Cranney and Roberston wanted to confront an embedded “dramatic canon” about the way we view gender on stage, seeing the female roles as simply subsidiary and supportive – women waiting in the sidelines to lament their male hero’s woes or share his successes.

In fact, such was her penchant for playing the ill-used associate of leading men, all having betrayed her in a variety of nefarious and heart-wrenching ways, that Burns had delightedly nicknamed her writer Hellie ‘tell-me-it’s-not-true’ Cranney even before their first encounter.

This play is about featuring women independent of men, but it is also just about the fragility of relationships. Following the course of a single night and the morning after an unexpected family reunion, its showcase of five women in one house is hardly a revolutionary step in gender relations, but it’s not meant to be either.

Instead, it is a product of the writers’ desire to take gender out of the equation. They tell me that they want their audience, unsurprisingly, to respond to the characters and situations, not arbitrary definitions of sex, and they’re right. For all our admiration of our play that sets out to give women a scene that isn’t next to the kitchen sink, it’s ultimately revealing about the stage’s state of affairs that nobody blinks twice at an all-male cast.

It’s funny, Cranney and Robertson confess, that when they first met and sat around getting drunk and debating their ideas for the project, they were momentarily stumped by the whole idea. In what situation would there be a group of just women on stage? People were reluctantly floating around visions of nurses – something they definitively wanted to avoid – until someone pointed out that the whole evening there hadn’t been a man in sight and nobody had noticed.

This scene of The Other Line’s initial conception is entirely indicative of the way that the production has proceeded: namely, that it was a hugely collaborative procedure, and most of the cast was involved from the word go.

In fact, it was actually Burns who made the first motivating move – getting in contact last year with all the fellow females she most wanted to work with. This kind of company-based creativity, she argues, is commonplace to comedy, but somehow grossly neglected in theatre.

There’s a sense, according to Cranney, that the director has to come to the programming committee with their own fully-fledged, independent idea, or “it’s nepotism”, but, as an actor, this opportunity for a real say in the process is wonderfully liberating. To me, it sounds like an incredibly exciting realisation of exactly what student theatre is all about. After all, lots of theatrical heads are better than one.

The Other Line runs at the ADC from 18th February to 22nd February.