Talent, Sheffield Crucible review: a fitfully funny flashback to when Victoria Wood was a new face

Victoria Wood’s 1978 debut play – Talent – was literally written on the back of an envelope. Not the entire thing but the scenario that clinched the commission was dashed off overnight.

It was then scripted in three weeks in the Morecambe flat the 25-year-old shared with her comedy magician partner (later husband) Geoffrey Durham (known as The Great Soprendo): “Is this a play?” she would ask him, a touch baffled.

Broadly speaking, of course, yes. After all, it co-won Wood the Evening Standard’s "most promising playwright" award; it lifted her out of passing career doldrums (she even signed on for a bit) and gave her a big reputational boost as a writer-performer.

All the same, as it returns to Sheffield, 43 years on (and five years after her death), reopening the Crucible for the first time since a flicker of activity last autumn (setting aside the Snooker Championships), the "what-is-it?" question still hangs in the air.

Set amid a talent-show night in a rundown northern cabaret club, it draws on Wood’s first-hand youthful experiences, trying her luck, unsuccessfully, in such insalubrious locales (albeit she notably won a 1974 heat of the TV talent show New Faces). Though it runs 90 minutes there’s still something of an extended sketch about it; its songs feel dropped in willy-nilly.

Does that matter? Not especially, so long as your expectations are duly tempered. The slimline backstage action centres on Julie, a vivacious secretary with stars in her eyes – inspired by Julie Walters, whom Wood had recently befriended. Tagging along for support is her frumpier pal Maureen – a typist, initially performed by Wood herself.

It’s an early fictional marker of the comedic force the pair would become. ‘Julie’, played in Paul Foster’s smartly cast revival by Lucie Shorthouse with a nice, dreamy air of preoccupation, is undefeated by the yukky dressing-room. She chatters away, and even cheekily pees into a plastic boater hat to avoid the lavatory. Yet she carries a premature wistfulness, relayed in a perky-poignant number Fourteen Again. For her part, Maureen (Jamie-Rose Monk) is endearingly inhibited: a confessed chocoholic, tartly bemused and quaintly virginal.

Some of the material, swerving from conversational apercus into wonderfully matter of fact surrealism, ranks as vintage Wood: “How come she stopped being a nun?” “They were always having tomato soup, and she lost her faith”.

At the premiere in the studio, one reviewer talked of it being funny “at times, too near the knicker-wetting degree”. Here, though, looking a touch over-exposed on the main-stage, the socially distanced audience inevitably more muted, the laugh-o-meter isn’t tested to breaking point. Besides, while it’s good fun to smile at period allusions to Babychams, avocados being a treat and "colour tellies", some of the references - to "dwarfs", say, or the "big-boned" – convey decidedly pre-PC attitudes.

Moreover, you can’t ignore the darker thematic touches. Julie’s former partner, who left her after impregnating her, surfaces, insouciantly, as the club’s organist. Even more unperturbed is the sleazy compere, who makes predatory moves on both women. Just about compensating for this indictment of toxic male chauvinism are two enjoyably daft old-time magicians. An interesting curio, all told. It's fascinating to contemplate Wood on the cusp of greatness, and to see Britain on the brink of Thatcherism; heartening, too, to behold the Crucible rise again.

Until July 24. sheffieldtheatres.co.uk. Tickets: 0114 249 6000; live-stream from July 7