The past few theatrical weeks have not been kind to wannabe entertainers from the Seventies.

Victoria Wood’s Talent (1978), at the Menier Chocolate Factory, fails to engage us with the travails of an aspiring singer. Trevor Griffiths’s Comedians (1975), considered by many to be one of the best plays of that decade, makes us realise uneasily how greatly stand-up, but even more crucially our perception of entertainment, has evolved in three decades.

State-of-the-nation dramas have a nasty habit of falling flat when removed from the particular era that inspired them. While Comedians certainly shouldn’t be booed offstage now, it’s not going to be gifted any slots on primetime television. Above all, Sean Holmes’s production leaves us feeling stranded throughout these three tightly-drawn acts that unfold in real time.

Surely Griffiths’s six would-be funny men — how a woman might have leavened the mix — aren’t meant to be as woefully unamusing as they appear here? The biggest laughs of the evening are in danger of coming ironically from the play’s title.

Griffiths has much that is pertinent to say about working-class culture, the destruction thereof by mass media and, above all, what is justifiable in the name of entertainment. More expansive establishing of the men’s personal circumstances would help, but the script’s major problem continues to be the late splurge of final act truth-telling. This explains, at last, why Eddie Waters (Matthew Kelly), former comedian turned night-school tutor to six hopefuls, looks as though he wouldn’t recognise a joke if it walked in dripping from the Manchester rain. Nonetheless, he has arranged for the lads to perform in front of talent scout Bert Challoner (Keith Allen, toning down his customary boisterousness commendably), who ominously advises: “Perhaps we can’t all be Max Bygraves. But we can try.”

Act Two takes us to the club for the men’s routines, to today’s ears an exhausting round of sexual and racial stereotypes, except for combative individualist Gethin Price (David Dawson), who performs a mime while wearing jackboots. The point, as relevant and depressing now as in 1975, is that these acts were hastily rejigged to accommodate Challoner’s determinedly lowbrow tastes, but the hints we get of Waters’s “truer” comedic influence aren’t much more inspiring. Kelly is even more dour than the role demands, and if it weren’t for the sparkiness of the livewire Dawson, we might occasionally think we’d wandered into an evening class for undertakers.

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