It is easy to tell yourself at various moments that Jim Cartwright’s first play has dated in the 30-odd years since it premièred in the Royal Court’s Upstairs space... easy to say, but impossible to believe for any length of time. Now as at the high-water-mark of Thatcherism, northern English communities such as the fictitious Lancashire one Cartwright portrays are blasted by industrial decline and governmental disdain alike, leaving folk to scrape a meagre economic and, more to the point, psychological subsistence as best they can. For Road is not an overtly political play: it shows its characters in low-budget frolics on a weekend night or unable to find the inner resources even for such a fleeting escape. Its strength, its bleak beauty, is that it concerns itself with people rather than issues. It never mentions politics, never points fingers. But it knows, and so do we.

Perhaps the most significant change in the intervening period is that we’re now more keenly conscious of that region’s contributions to musical culture. Director John Tiffany smartly underpins a sense of time and place by punctuating matters with ’80s tracks by bands from Manchester and environs: New Order, James... there’s a bizarre moment when most of the cast cut loose to the brutalist strains of The Fall’s “Hit The North”. He sets the action, though, on a largely bare stage, occupied at most by the occasional chair except when a large glass-sided cage rises to show characters more confined than the revellers.

The Court’s original runs cast known extravagant performers in the role of Scullery, the scally MC of the night’s action: first Edward Tudor-Pole (better known at the time as Eddie Tenpole, frontman of rock band Tenpole Tudor), then when the play moved downstairs to the theatre’s main space the legendary Ian Dury. For this revival Tiffany has cast poet, playwright and performer Lemn Sissay. There’s a little too much of the carnival barker about Sissay’s Scullery for my taste; he doesn’t complement the often heartbreaking despair in the scenes themselves, but sometimes threatens to cheapen it. However, this may well be more a matter of the character than the performer, and it also makes a discreet point about the multiculturalism of today’s communities (Tiffany is the director who cast the excellent Afro-British actor Noma Dumezweni as Hermione in Harry Potter And The Cursed Child). The cast includes a number of proven reliables (in the best sense): we see Michelle Fairley trying to pretend to both a drunken squaddie and to herself that she’s up for some action; Mark Hadfield showing his estimable comic skills and, for once, his equal ability to get serious and poignant; June Watson trying desperately to take refuge in ageing memories; Shane Zaza bedbound with crushing depression. To be honest, part of me wanted Road to be less effective now, but I wouldn’t wish one iota of its grim indictment away.

Written for the Financial Times.