On the face of it, Enjoy is the straightforward darkly comic tale of a couple clinging onto life in a back-to-back that is due to be knocked down.

The ageing couple, convincingly played by Alison Steadman (now best known for Gavin & Stacey) and David Troughton (latterly of New Tricks fame), found they were more happy discussing their lives with an interloper from the council than with each other. This included frank talk about their sex lives, disability, hopes for the future and regrets of the past.

Questions of life and death are tackled, such as how we don't appreciate what we have until it's gone, whether to cling to what we know or seek new horizons, why we delude ourselves from an obvious truth, and how we put on airs and graces only for an audience.

The characters were observed on stage throughout, being shadowed by silent local authority officials, ostensibly there to study "real life" before the terraces were bulldozed. This was a useful tool for the author, Alan Bennett, the two main characters becoming remarkably self-aware – and painfully cognisant of the truth behind the hidden lives of their two grown-up offspring.

First performed in 1980, this play is great fun and ages beautifully, with the constant refrain that "we're in the 20th century now, you know" reminding us that for those re-homed to the new museum, that's where they would stay. For ever.

Patrick Astill