Mary Astell is not known for her knitting. If she is remembered at all, it is for being England’s first feminist. In 1694, she published A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, a treatise arguing for women’s education. Yet here she is with knitting needles and a handsome strip of pink wool. She is as surprised as anyone.

In Shelagh Stephenson’s spiky comedy, that only makes her more anxious. She is in some kind of afterlife: it cannot be purgatory because that would be too Catholic for this high Anglican, but it does not seem like heaven either. Rather, it appears to be a repository for women on the verge of being forgotten. The panelled walls of Amy Watts’s set taper ominously into oblivion. What difference whether she could knit or not if she is to be written out of history anyway?

That is not a problem for her celestial companion, Virginia Woolf. The novelist’s place in the canon is assured and she is free to roam, while Astell is shackled to a rope and could be dragged away at any moment (shades of Waiting for Godot’s Lucky). That divides them, as does their attitude to religion, science and the centuries that separate them.

Played by Phillippa Wilson and Tessa Parr, the former starchy and formal as Astell, the latter expansive and lithe as Woolf, they make an amusing double act. In Karen Traynor’s production, they find common ground too: in their instinct for independence, rejection of patriarchy and love of a good laugh – not to mention a late-developing taste for sherry.

Where Sartre’s No Exit suggested hell is other people, Astell and Woolf narrows down the devil to domineering men. Stephenson, whose play is the third in a “Cullercoats trilogy” after A Northern Odyssey and Harriet Martineau Dreams of Dancing, is not the first to rail against the silencing and abuse of women, but in comparing notes across the centuries, she identifies points of progress, battles still to be won and the sacrifices made by feminist pioneers.

She does this with much wit, which keeps the production skipping along, but the play’s pleasures are conversational not dramatic. The women’s banter is variously brisk, silly and impassioned, but without an underlying urgency, the direction of travel is slow to reveal itself.

• At Live theatre, Newcastle, until 6 June