The academic and literary critic F.R. Leavis's reputation has long been on the wane, maybe because his moral austerity doesn't suit our era, but he was a huge influence in the early 1960s, when Simon Gray was at Cambridge. Indeed, the dramatist later described him as “the only great man I have met”. His reward, as he also remembered, was to be derided as an insensitive “brute” by Leavis's purer acolytes, who tended to think that literature stopped with D.H. Lawrence and can't have liked Gray's creative aspirations or sly, wry humour.

Those fastidious groupies certainly wouldn't have liked the characters in the 1984 play being entertainingly revived at the Menier. As Cambridge undergraduates in 1968 they launch a magazine they call The Common Pursuit, which is the title of Leavis's key collection of essays but, as graduates in the 1970s and 1980s, they find it tough, going on impossible, to keep it afloat in London. That rigour can't survive in a world regrettably populated by real people with real weaknesses and subject to real financial pressures — and before long the enterprise has dwindled into a tiny publishing house specialising in slick coffee-table books.

The play appeared at the time of the film The Big Chill, and maybe belongs to the same genre, involving as it does compromise and lost ideals. But it's more sophisticated, sharper, funnier and, though Fiona Laird's production doesn't update the proceedings, as topical as ever. London still offers plenty of counterparts of Nick — a comically bumptious Reece Shearsmith — who eventually finds fame on an inglorious TV show. And the city isn't exactly lacking in the fibs, betrayals and double-dealing that rock these literati's lives and menace their friendships.

There are plenty of darkly funny moments, as when Nick blunders into the magazine's London office and promptly exits, baffled by the loaded silence that has followed the editor's discovery that his wife has been having a long-term affair with the publisher he has always liked but subtly patronised. The faces of Robert Portal, Mary Stockley and Ben Caplan make him feel he's dancing in an icebox or has gatecrashed a funeral.

There are also many reminders that, with Gray, the gods are ironists. It's typical that a literary wife should have an abortion so as not to add to her husband's financial burdens just before he's awarded the Arts Council grant that would make the mag secure. Typical, too, that a lively Nigel Harman, as a promising academic, should end up a sleazy philanderer.

It's also typical that James Dreyfus's tough, shrewd Humphry, who becomes his college's “moral tutor” and remains withering about the others' hypocrisies, should become the victim of a taste for rough trade. But then this is a play filled with surprise, incongruity, and dangerous wit: a testimony to its author's abiding excellence.

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