THIS piece treads the familiar track so beloved of Hull Truck Theatre, a desolate road where hopes and dreams fall by the wayside with every step.

We enter - or are rather hurled - into a world of grubby bars with pretensions far above their station, where the fancy and phoney over-priced cocktails give the merest glimpse of a faraway land of sun and blue skies.

It is a Shangri la that is equally as unattainable for waitress and punter alike. Regardless of what side of the counter they stand, all are caught in a trap from which there is no real escape… True to company tradition, the action is shared by four actors. Liz Carney, Claire Eden, Pippa Fulton and Annmarie Hosell turn in remarkable performances both as servants and the dodgy customers that they are obliged to tolerate or suffer, depending on how the night unfolds.

The time is the 1980s and I have no doubt that back in the days of Margaret Thatcher, Arthur Scargill and Duran Duran, this work would be considered ‘gritty’ just as much present-day drama is repeatedly labelled cutting edge.

However, apart from the lightning fast dialogue flowing from the pens of John Godber and Jane Thornton, Shakers suffers from the delusion that the parodying of working and upper class accents, liberally salted with casual obscenity, is all that’s required to carry the day.

The trouble is that this makes for lazy laughs. Toffs talk like BBC announcers from the 1940s, while tough sons of toil mix abusive sexism with wall-to-wall lewdness. It all becomes strangely pedestrian after a while.

Of course, real life contains all of this, but the sheer repetition sadly soon begins to become wearisome. And after a while, it actually starts to write itself – even when the tidy homily comes at the end, you’re left with the cloying feeling that there were quite a number of opportunities left unexplored.

Shakers runs until Saturday.