The title of Samantha Ellis's latest play - How to Date a Feminist - would sit very comfortably in the self-help canon. If it was a book, it would look perfectly at home in Waterstones' self-improvement section. But it is written for the stage so one can instead imagine queues of unreconstructed male chauvinists clamouring at the box office of the Arcola theatre in Hackney, where the play opens this week, to learn what it takes to be an enlightened, sensitive, metrosexual male.
No sooner did the play's posters go up than scaffolders across London doubtless slid down their poles to join Tory MPs in the theatre stall to learn the mystical secrets of how to not wolf-whistle women or tell the "dears" to calm down.
But, once in their seats, these men would soon find that their assumptions about Ellis's play are somewhat misplaced. How to Date a Feminist is no self-righteous guide aimed at male chauvinists. Rather, it's a rom-com, and one of the best of the play's many funny gags is that the feminist of the title is not the woman (a Jewish journalist called Kate, played by Sarah Daykin), but the man (Tom Berish), an achingly aware, right-on feminist son of a Greenham Common protester.
"I did slightly want to write a feminist rom-com,' says Ellis almost apologetically. She is sitting in a quiet corner of the Arcola where rehearsals of her two-hander have just broken for lunch.
"For me, the rom-com heyday was in the '80s," she continues. "But I watch stuff now and I often think they have gone in a bad direction. In things like [the Seth Rogen movie] Knocked Up I was appalled by the fact that this very high-powered, together woman gets pregnant and has to end up with this complete loser who sits around with his friends watching porn all day. She has to end up with him because that's the structure of the film."
Ellis, a former arts journalist, is now probably best known for her first book, an acclaimed literary memoir published in 2014 that was written at about the same time as her current stage comedy and which shares a similar title. Called How to be a Heroine, it explores the relationship Ellis has with her many literary heroines and how they influence her life. The play is nowhere near as autobiographical, though similarities between Kate, who is attracted to "sexy cads", and her creator do exist.
"She's 30, I'm 41," says Ellis. "She's not where I am now but I definitely did fancy all those bad men," by which Ellis means the caddish and brutish type that can send the heart rates of even completely rational female feminists racing.
"I'm also interested how, for a feminist such as me or my friends, it is impossible to say: 'I don't believe women should have equal pay' for example, and yet it is totally possible for us to swoon over these cads - these bad men - not all my female friends, of course," adds Ellis quickly, "Lots of them have always been more enlightened than me.
"But why does our politics stop when we fall in love? I've always had this idea about seeing if you could fancy a different person. Because your life would be so much better if you didn't stick with the same kind of man."
In life at least, Ellis has succeeded in that task. Although vehemently resistant to the notion that being single is a problem that "needs to be solved", six months ago, Ellis married fellow writer Jude Cook, author of the novel Byron Easy who - in a good way - is certainly no Heathcliff.
As Kate points out in the play, the stormy anti-hero of Wuthering Heights hits a woman on page 28. Nor is Cook a proselytising feminist such as the man in her play, Ellis assures me. But, to some extent at least, Ellis's life is practising what her writing preaches. Because, just as her book is partly about "not falling for people like Heathcliff anymore" so her play also explores how to avoid repeating the same mistakes. Not content with that ambition, Ellis also hopes it will address the way Jews and other ethnicities are depicted on stage, which brings us to her heroine's Jewishness.
Like Samantha, Kate is a secular Jew and has an Israeli father (though he's not necessarily of the same stock as Ellis's parents who were Iraqi Jewish refugees.) But there is a sense that Kate "has a strong sense of her Jewish history," as Ellis puts it.
Why? Well, "why not?" is Ellis's blunt answer. For too long, theatre - and indeed British film - have needed a reason embedded in the narrative to stage plays with Jews (and other ethnicities).
So, to oppose that status quo, Kate is Jewish not because her Judaism is crucial to the plot of the play, but because she just is.
"It's about representation," explains Ellis. "I want to see more people on stage who are different kinds of people. I am Iraqi, Jewish and for a long time had seizures, so I am disabled as well, and I'm a woman. All of those four groups I don't see on stage very much.
"There are also many other groups I don't see on stage. I love that, in Friends, for example, there were characters that were just Jewish and that their Jewishness barely came up. It feels more like real life, where you meet people and don't get their entire history at once.
Often theatre and film producers are locked into what Ellis calls their "default" assumptions about who can populate a story. "'Why is this character Jewish,' they would ask and I'd think, 'well, they just are!' I mean, why are they a lawyer, or why do they live in London?"
That's not to say that being Jewish will always be incidental for Ellis's characters. Her next play, which is being written for a drama school is "about secret Jews during the Tudor period" and it will demand Jewish characters as insistently as did the plot for Ellis's earlier play Cling To Me Like Ivy, the main subject (and prop) of which was the sheitel. Even with Kate, Ellis admits there was another motive to write the character: "She has grown up in Hendon and she's not necessarily going out with Jewish men and she wants to find the person she loves. I wanted to look at secular Jews who nevertheless identify as Jewish." Nevertheless, the creation of Kate is an attempt by Ellis to oppose the attitudes that would have otherwise kept Kate from being Jewish.
"I don't think people ask 'why is this character a man?' Or, 'why is he white?' But they do say 'why is this character black, or female, or gay?' If you put a white CofE man on stage, [his whiteness] doesn't need to be the reason behind why he does everything he does in the play."
Ellis was able to put all this aside, however, while writing her second book - or at least most of it. Take Courage, which comes out next year and has the slightly daunting subtitle of Bronte and the Art of Life, focuses on the lesser known, youngest of the Bronte sisters, Anne.
"There's scant information on Emily and Anne, though tons on Bramwell and Charlotte," says Ellis. "So it's a journey in search of Anne. Have you read her second novel? It's about a woman who falls for a sexy cad."
