Victoria Wood’s comedy series Dinnerladies ran on BBC television from 1998 to 2000 and was immensely popular.

David Graham has adapted these brilliantly written scripts to fashion a two-hour play that will certainly please the fans of the original.

The author is also the director, and as such knows how to use his performers to obtain the best out of the script and the laughter that ensues. And laughter there is a-plenty throughout the production!

The core character is Bren (Laura Sheppard) the deputy manager of the canteen. She’s apparently unflappable and yet vulnerable; Sheppard makes her a thoroughly credible woman who can’t quite accept that she might be having a mid-life crisis. Bren is further saddled with a bag-lady mother self-named as Petula (Jacqueline Clarke).

Emily Butterfield is Twinkle, the teenager who has no sense of time-keeping, nicely contrasted with Shobna Gulati’s simple Anita, a girl who will automatically grasp the wrong end of any stick offered to her.

Shobna is one of the two actors in the stage play (Andrew Dunn the other) who were in the original TV series.

Louise Dumayne plays Philippa, the mean-well do-ill manager of the work’s human resources department. Stella Rose plays Jean and Liz Bagley is her friend Dolly. Popping in and out are Jane (Joanna Lee Martin) and, in an hilarious cameo, Peter Brad-Leigh as Bob.

The two main male characters are canteen manager Tony (Andrew Dunn) and janitor Stan (Barrie Palmer). Dunn makes the former understandable as he uses bluff bonhomie to disguise an inner uncertainty. Palmer is initially funny as the man with the least pleasant jobs, always coming up against other people’s technical incompetence. Later he is very moving as the son who finds it difficult to articulate his fears over his father’s ill-health.

A fabulous production, with laughter from beginning to end.