Cloud Mine, Almeida, London

The career of Thea Sharrock shot to prominence when she won the prestigious James Menzies-Kitchen Award for Young Directors with her precociously gifted production of Top Girls, Caryl Churchill's enduringly great Thatcher-era play about women and the conflicting views on what ambitions are appropriate for them (not just between the sexes but among females, too, and across history). Unusually, but justly, Sharrock went on to remount the production in the West End.

As a calling card, it was – in its subject matter – intriguingly ironic, for Sharrock quickly became one of those women directors who are repeatedly accused of being pushy and overambitious (whatever that means) on the theatrical grapevine. There are the ancient double standards at work here. A male equivalent would be considered admirably determined and even visionary. And, besides, push is surely something that you would want to expect from a director, regardless of their gender.

Sharrock now returns to the work of Churchill in this beautifully modulated and cannily cast production of Cloud Nine at the Almeida.

The piece, first seen in 1979, combines the preoccupation with gender-roles, that Churchill was to explore further in Top Girls, with a deconstruction of racism of a kind brilliantly anticipated in Eugene O'Neill's Emperor Jones, a historically advanced piece of experiment that Sharrock has just come from directing at the National. So for Sharrock-followers, there is a pleasing accretion of illuminating cross-references in her choice of material.

And there's the paradox at the heart of my response to this deeply considered and – just as importantly – deeply felt production of Cloud Nine. I think that you would guess that it had been directed by a woman for only the superficially counter-intuitive reason that, in the excellent performances it has nurtured and in its angle of presentation, it displays such an empathetic understanding of the male characters in the piece.

Max Stafford-Clark, who commissioned, helped develop and directed the premiere of the play, is the best director of women's plays that this country has yet produced, but in subsequent revivals by other men, there has been a tendency to slant the play in crudely anti-male ways in order to show feminist credibility of the male director.

To be sure, the play – which begins in Victorian Africa and then jumps to England in the 1970s, where the same set of characters have aged by a mere 25 years – investigates the parallels between sexual and colonial oppression and repression. And there are some wonderfully funny hits on male complacency. The colonial Governor's secretly gay best friend tells his chum's wife that: "You have been thought of where no white woman has ever been thought of before." She then makes the half-accidentally radical reply: "I suppose that's one way of having adventures".

The production is an expert mix of the lucid and the ludic as it plays Churchill's then-avant-garde games with casting against gender, colour, age et al. And there are fantastic performances from the cast members playing female roles. But, for me, the greatest things about the evening are those moments where Sharrock brings out the tender comic solicitude with which Churchill understands that life for, say, a Seventies husband almost rendered impotent in his desire to pleasure his demanding, textbook-toting, and repressed lesbian wife, can't be a picnic either.

Tobias Menzies is sublimely funny and touching as he tiptoes, concessively, frustratedly and unassumingly, through the minefield of his life in this role.

But what hits throughout the evening is the largeness of Caryl Churchill's spirit. She takes on board how none of us are given the choice of our gender before we enter the world. Therefore boys can justly be viewed as themselves victims of the patriarchal machine into which they are fed.

Cloud Nine now feels a curious customer, by turns a touch dated yet still ahead of its time. While allowing us to take pleasure in its tragicomic tricksiness, Thea Sharrock also manages to hit us with its emotional truthfulness.

To 8 December (020-73 59 4404)