‘And Zeus created … Essex.” Playwright Ava Pickett set her award-winning debut, 1536, in her home county during Tudor times: her latest has Helen of Troy returning home to a Towie-style living room at the end of an English civil war.

An Adidas-clad Messenger functions as chorus, bringing us up to speed on this new England where angry men have rioted and petrol-bombed, wreaking havoc in Helen’s name after she left her husband, Marcus, for a so-called “foreigner”. The cream carpets and glass coffee tables belong to Cee – Helen’s best friend, married to Marcus’s big brother Mario – and it’s here that the men arrive with a shivering Helen to toast their victory with prosecco.

What comes next is a truly tense two hours. Given real-life scenes of masked vigilantes in Dover and Portsmouth this month, Pickett’s dystopian vision feels uncomfortably close, albeit infused with a Martin McDonagh-esque black wit. At one point a guard looms with an automatic weapon as Laura Aikman’s tradwife Cee attempts to glide over the undercurrents of violence and misogyny with platters of mozzarella sticks and prawn picky bits.

It’s a play that’s less about toxic masculinity and insidious racism than women’s response to it. Michelle Dockery’s Helen moves through multiple gears, from victim to rebel to a mother confronted with the daughter she abandoned. And on opening night, Maimuna Memon’s uncompromising Dani prompted a cheer in parts of the audience for her takedown of Cee’s complicity.

Those versed in Greek myth – and the rest of us who’ve watched Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey – will have their ideas of where the plot is heading, correct or not. The abruptness of the play’s climax does leave us wondering what Pickett is really trying to say about free will – Ethan Moorhouse’s blisteringly poetic interludes as Messenger introduce a pantheon of external forces dressed as gods, while a naked tree reaches across Polly Sullivan’s set like a malevolent hand. But both comedy and drama are deftly paced and balanced in the production by Stratford East’s new artistic director Lisa Spirling, amplified by Nicola T Chang’s bone-shaking score and sound.