A period of sweetness that wanes within a month: as the most widely accepted etymology of the word “honeymoon” shows, love’s chances of surviving the pressures of everyday life have never been considered that high. In the seaside-postcard tradition, blushing brides and overeager young men quickly mutate into the beefy harridans and henpecked eunuchs on the next rack down. At first glance, the 18-year-old newlyweds in Richard Bean’s new play, Honeymoon Suite (Royal Court), are straight from the Donald McGill portfolio: it’s 1955, Eddie (Liam Garrigan) and Irene (Sara Beharrell) come from working-class Hull and they are as entranced by the mod cons of their Bridlington honeymoon suite as they are confused by champagne and contraception. What undermines this charming portrayal of post-war sexuality, however, is the disreputable old man in the grubby trousers and grey mullet the audience has already seen wandering about the room, a presence invisible to the young lovers.

Later, a middle-aged couple in the clothing of 1980s suburbia appear, then a stately woman in a high-powered suit joins the unsavoury man — a pile-up of innocence and experience designed to depict the three ages of Eddie and Irene’s marriage. These three couples occupy the same stage simultaneously, moving about the hotel room that has meant so much to them, almost bumping into themselves. Each incarnation has a different variation on their name, showing the skin-shedding that occurs in the course of a 50-year relationship. By their silver wedding anniversary, Eddie and Irene have become Tits (Jeremy Swift) and Izzy (Caroline O’Neill), the disappointed Thatcher-era couple returning for a horribly compromised celebration; another 25 years and they are Whitchell (John Alderton) and Marfleet (Marjorie Yates), meeting up again after decades of separation.

It’s a rather literal metaphor for the shifts and alterations of life, this theatrical palimpsest of past and present, but it certainly encourages the audience to make the necessary comparisons, to recognise Bean’s themes of love and survival. With one look, you can join the dots between the smart, aspirational Irene, correcting her husband’s grammar and resisting the pressure to have a child before she’s 20, the frustrated middle-aged women breaking free to attend university and the celebrated Labour baroness responsible (somewhat ludicrously) for the Irish peace process. At one point, Irene holds her husband’s face in her hands and tells him she will never lie to him — 25 years and one line later, Izzy tells her husband that she has been unfaithful.

It might be a heavy-handed gimmick, but it’s deftly staged, the couples moving gracefully around their other selves even as they smash into real-life trouble.

The play itself, however, is not quite so graceful. Like the hotelroom set, the narrative is overcrowded, a boarding house for the playwright’s ideas. Bean is so keen to depict the clash between idealised love and the rough realities of work and marriage that he heaps on the social context, giving Eddie and Irene a life that the writers of Emmerdale might find eventful. As with his play Under the Whaleback, the Hull-born Bean revisits the decline of his home town’s fishing industry, linking the Whitchells’ marital fortunes with the financial disaster triggered by the death of cod. Even in their honeymoon innocence, the worm of destruction is present when Eddie reveals his dream to run his own fish merchant’s — a scheme that later involves him in an insurance fraud. Meanwhile, Irene frets over how her father will pay for their room — a debt that ultimately causes a tragedy. There’s polio, three miscarriages, more than one death — Bean’s desperation to indicate a world beyond the dream of romance symbolised by the suite gradually becomes as stultifying as the hotel chintz.

It might risk being something of a cold fish were it not for the salty vigour of the dialogue and the depth of the performances. For a playwright obsessed by the world of honest work and manly sweat, he is surprisingly good at writing women, and even though he bestows a foolishly grand fate upon Irene, her three stages of development are credibly captured. A desire to be “posh” and move to a good area — portrayed by Beharrell with a deceptively prim toughness — gives way to a desperate desire to escape; the bootstrap insecurities of the brittle night-school student mature into the bluff fatalism of Yates’s confident baroness. The men are equally convincing: Garrigan plays the half-formed Eddie with the right amounts of spivvy voraciousness and youthful bluster, while Jeremy Swift’s crumpled softness matches his overwhelming moral weaknesses. It’s John Alderton, however, who gets the best of both the comedy and the tragedy as the 67-year-old Whitchell, living alone in the hotel he bought with his insurance money, a shoplifting loner with a taste for tarts, both from Mr Kipling and the sauna across the road. The scenes between him and Yates are ultimately the most affecting, the tenderness and tension that exists between them indicating how well they know each other and how little they understand each other.

Life is hard, marriage is tough, loneliness is a universal state: hardly ideas likely to trouble the patent office. Yet in the neutral space of a hotel room, between the champagne bucket and the bidet, Bean succeeds in showing a couple struggling against being guests in their own lives, a generous and affectionate portrait of a love that never quite checks out.