Ilkley Playhouse: Getting on by Alan Bennett.

Getting On is Alan Bennett’s second play, from 1971. Set contemporarily, a newly post-imperial Britain, having only recently readjusted to the swinging sixties, now finds itself having to cope with not only the loss of its leading nation status but the additional threats of flares and atrocious facial hair.

A typically prosaic Bennett setting – a suburban living room – hosts five scenes over six months in the life of George Oliver, a world-weary Labour MP, and his family. There’s a core cast of just six: George, played with wonderful jadedness by Dick Hebbert; his dissatisfied wife Polly (Rebecca Yates), "ankle-deep in blighted hopes and Brussel sprouts"; Geoff, a handyman who proves handy in several ways; George’s best friend Brian, a closeted Tory MP; Enid, Polly’s eccentric mother, prurient and prune-obsessed; and Andy, George’s teenage son from his first marriage. (There’s also a brief but amusing cameo from Denise MacGregor as an angry neighbour with a liberated approach to dog-training.)

Decidedly not an action-driven play, it takes the form of a series of conversations – and the occasional monologue – exploring life, love and lust, and of course the twin Bennett staples of nostalgia and regret: as George acerbically puts it, "The usual load of bitterness and despair that people lump around with them." Getting On is a series of vignettes than a driving narrative, although under Jacquie Howard’s direction, several well-brewed strands start to intertwine pleasingly towards the end.

No one’s very happy. George and Polly’s marriage – George’s second – is under the usual strains: "Our children, on licence from Strangeways," as George caustically remarks (George does a lot of caustic remarking). George lives in a world of words and grand ideas with scant bearing on reality, which doesn’t go unnoticed by the others and oddly doesn’t help Polly in her battle with domestic claustrophobia.

Enid (a very funny performance from Jan Thomas) has health problems which a surfeit of prunes are inexplicably failing to resolve, while Brian (likewise from Robson Stroud), a self-described "outrageous poof", struggles under the weight of social repression. Elliott Benn’s Geoff the handyman is the catalyst for Bennett’s thoughts on class distinctions and education, as well as some more, er, earthly impulses. 17-year-old Andy, played by Rob Paul, allows an examination of intergenerational value shifts, as well as the inevitable sexual awakening ("He’s found his feet, and other parts of his anatomy").

For a play well into its fifth decade, it’s striking how contemporary many themes are. There’s a short dialogue in the first act about interior design which, with the addition of a couple of references to Ikea, is something you might overhear verbatim in a 2017 Starbucks, while a gravestone coffee table (one of Polly’s home improvement ideas) is the sort of thing modern hipster boutiques in Hackney probably stock. Sex, politics and regret are of course timeless. It’s largely just the set and the occasional detail – a four-digit phone number; references to Notting Hill as a poor, working-class area and Margaret Thatcher as a coming force – that remind us we’re looking back several decades.

Getting On perhaps lacks the tautness and narrative drive of some other Bennett plays such as Habeus Corpus, but there’s plenty to enjoy here. Few writers can pierce bombast and highlight contradiction so succinctly and eloquently: "I tried to set up an anarchist community, but no one would obey the rules," Geoff notes dolefully at one point.

The set is critical for a single-setting play. This one is intricate and beautifully realised, with an authentic early 70s feel (mercifully, 1971 seems to have been before checked wallpaper became ubiquitous). According to Stage Manager Nourie Elsmore, who does a wonderful job of keeping things in order, there are over 60 props, partly reflecting George’s wife Polly’s obsession with amassing what George wearily refers to as "a definitive collection of objets d’art".

In short, Getting On is an amusing, acerbic and almost timeless evocation of life, love, lust and laundry.