They say men are from Mars and women are from Venus and the two will never truly understand each other.

But writer and actor Ché Walker, whose new play The Etienne Sisters stars three women, says he has never had any problems writing female characters.

"No I don’t find it harder, “ says the 47-year-old who's parents are actress Ann Mitchell and her second husband director Robert Walker.

“I grew up with a single mum and the house I grew up in was all single mums from the basement to the top, and the roots of my family are in the East End which has this tremendous tradition of strong women so I have never found it that hard to write women.”

Set in London, The Etienne Sisters is an intimate play with only three on-stage characters and Ché says it is nice to get back to basics after the grandeur of his groundbreaking pieces at Shakespeare’s Globe, The Lightning Child, the first contemporary musical to be perform there which was inspired by Euripides' The Bacchae' and blended several time zones and locations, and The Frontline, a contemporary play set in Camden featuring a cast of 24.

His latest work was inspired by his real-life relationship with a family called Etienne, developed with his students at Weekend Arts College (WAC), where he also studied, and workshopped at Theatre Royal Stratford East last September.

It stars MOBO award winner Allyson Ava-Brown Jennifer Saayeng (Ghost the Musical, Hairspray) and Nina Toussaint-White (EastEnders, Switch) as three sisters who are thrown back together after the death of their mother.

“The complexity of their dynamic is really interesting to explore,” says Che who has five sisters.

“I was keen to write something where there wasn’t the mention of a boyfriend once. I didn’t want to make it about the problems they had with men.”

He also says the all-back cast is purely incidental and the play, which features a jazz soundtrack, written by Anoushka Lucas and Sheila Atim, who Che worked with on Klook’s Last Stand at Park Theatre last year and performed by award-winning jazz pianist Nikki Yeoh, focuses on the question of whether family should always stick together.

“It is a question that runs through a lot of my plays but I think it is an unanswerable question because it depends on circumstances, but it is fun to explore, " says Ché who dreamt of being a basketball player but turned to theatre in his late teens and trained at Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art and WAC and in 2003 won the George Devine Award for Most Promising Playwright.

"I remember having these conversations in the late 80s when I was a student about how to attract more young people and diverse crowds to the theatre," says Ché who believes there is a 'cultural apartheid blighting London'.

"It’s interesting that 25 years later we are still having the same conversations. Things have just come round in a circle and we are in horribly conservative times.

"We have a government that will seriously talk about just allowing people to drown at sea and that kind of ripples through into everything, theatre and TV."

The Camden resident adds: “I work with students who can be from very chaotic background but they have vital perspectives and we are not doing enough to nurture them and expose them.

“It’s just a shame.”

"There’s no political pronouncements in this play, it’s a smaller domestic story. But it’s hard not to see it in the prism of the class war that has been declared by the elite."

Theatre Royal Stratford East, Gerry Raffles Square, London E15 1BN, September 10 to October 3. Details: 020 8534 0310, www.stratfordeast.com