FORGET you saw the film, which I did in the company of an 80-year-old aunt living in the Lower Don Valley, for whom the searingly sad moments, as well as the sense of humour and the language, were part of life.

This production is a girls’ night out, where even pathos is, for the most part, hilarious to an all-female (almost) audience which, on the first night, packed the Civic to the “gods”.

Simon Beaufoy has rewritten his screenplay for the stage and it plays more to that audience. Those first-nighters were, like the women in the workingmen’s club of the play, baying for flesh, but even they were brought to silence, and an odd “aah”, by young Nathan, played on this occasion by Ewan Phillips, one of four young actors to share the part.

He was credibly natural as he moved between his mum and her new partner and a feckless dad with a bizarre plan to raise the money for his maintenance.

Dad, Gaz, (Gary Lucy) was a cracking Jack-the-Lad at the head of an assorted troupe of would-be strippers and of a strong cast underlining the personalities, and frailties, of men trying to cope with a world where their workplace skills are as redundant as they are. The wives, very different types, were again brought out clearly.

Several of the cast doubled on minor parts as well and the production, under Jack Ryder’s direction, oozed teamwork. It was raucous, expletive-laden, crude and rib-achingly funny as the ill-assorted strippers practised strutting their stuff but, even while laughing, even in this version, it felt like you might at times cry. In Redcar they probably would.

Gill Wootten