The title chosen by the Arctic Monkeys for their chart-topping album, Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not, was originally spoken half a century ago by Arthur Seaton, the bolshy young hero of Alan Sillitoe’s 1958 novel, and in the celebrated film starring Albert Finney. It’s now spoken again in an enjoyable stage version by Amanda Whittington.

This nine-week tour of the East Midlands by New Perspectives Theatre Company and Lakeside Arts shows today’s audiences what life may well have been like for a mouthy factory worker in the Fifties. Arthur works in the Raleigh factory, drilling bicycle parts from Monday to Friday for a £14-a-week wage that allows him to enjoy his three weekend pleasures: boozing, fishing and screwing other men’s wives.

His politics are vaguely communist going on anarchist. He daydreams about blowing up the Raleigh factory and Nottingham Castle but has no sustained objection to his repetitive work. It allows his imagination to roam and it colours his character. He examines his life, and where in the book this emerges through reported thoughts, Whittington turns these into direct address.

Peacocking between work and play in his high- buttoned charcoal suit, Peter McCamley catches Arthur’s jack-the-lad assurance and the lop-sided grin that endears him to the three women he concurrently fancies: Winnie, Doreen and Brenda (Nicky Rafferty) Where he differs from an Alfie is in the respect he accords his women — apart from deceiving them about their rivals, that is. McCamley shows Arthur’s smile turning to complacency at what he takes to be his perpetual good fortune, even after Brenda’s abortion. This was left out of the film and is here obscured behind one of the screens that, along with a couple of chairs, provides all the scene-setting that Daniel Buckroyd uses in his swiftly paced production.

Doreen eventually hooks him as a husband but it is a weakness in this version that we do not understand that he has let himself be hooked. We have lost the context of his family life, and, crucially, the ruminative hours spent fishing by the canal. While remaining a clear “rite of passage” tale, the passage appears to lead to mere entrapment. The book left us with a sense that Arthur was not settling for that.

Box office: 0115-846 7777