Is David Storey alive and kicking? Yes, he’s just turned 74, is still writing and remains scandalously neglected by the theatres he once illumined. But Anna Mackmin’s revival of his second play, with the fashionable Orlando Bloom taking the role created by Brian Cox 40 years ago, gives a less literal answer to that question: Storey’s work isn’t just alive but has a kick capable of separating today’s audiences from their emotional teeth.

Bloom is Steven Shaw, one of three sons returning from the comfy, middle-class South to celebrate his parents’ ruby wedding in the Yorkshire village where his father works as a coalminer. Superficially it’s an unrewarding part, because he spends most of the time looking wan and saying little but that he’s “fine”, but an important one. He’s a teacher who hasn’t only abandoned the novel he was writing but has lost his old fire and ire. In his aloof, broken way he’s the most troubling proof of Storey’s thesis: that education and social mobility can damage the heart as well as open the mind.

Does this idea, which comes from Storey’s own experience as a miner’s son made good, date the play? A bit. Certainly, the drab coal community where the play is set must have disappeared during the Thatcher-Scargill wars. But we still read Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers and in many ways In Celebration is wiser and more balanced than that. Here, it’s Dearbhla Molloy’s Mrs Shaw, a pathologically undemonstrative Yorkshire woman escaped from Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads, who stands accused of causing the damage, and not her miner husband, in Tim Healy’s equally strong performance a genial, outgoing man who impregnated her when she was 20 and is still earnestly appeasing her 40 years later.

So where’s the drama? That comes, not from Bloom’s Steven, but from his oldest brother Andy, a lawyer-turned-artist who tries to use him as a weapon in a celebration that becomes an anti-celebration and abortive act of revenge. Taking a role created by Alan Bates, Paul Hilton terrifies his father, Gareth Farr, as the most conventional of the brothers and us in the audience with the possibility that he’ll smash his socially pretentious, guilt-mongering mother to emotional smithereens.

With him mocking, sniping and exuding fake-cheery menace there’s no danger of Storey’s family politics lacking tension.

But it’s the play’s humanity that’s most striking. Storey makes a case for everyone, including Molloy’s Mrs Shaw, who has her hidden sweetnesses. And his implied conclusion is one that hasn’t dated at all. OK, they f*** you up, your mum and dad, but, as Larkin went on to say, they don’t mean to. Healy’s Shaw may have a secret pride in his work his sons lack and envy, but he’s been sincere in his efforts to help them “better” themselves. So in her narrow way has Molloy’s Mrs Shaw. It’s a tragedy that the result isn’t what it should be: happiness.

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