There's no business like show business — but, against that, there's no business like snow. On Monday night, the show failed to go on for two thirds of the West End, including Oliver!, Thriller — Live!, Mamma Mia! and even some plays without exclamation marks in their titles. The financial implications for the fragile ecosystem of London theatre? That will depend, according to Richard Pulford, the chief executive of the Society of London Theatre, on “the particular insurance arrangements of the particular shows”.

But there was no stopping this redoubtable revival of Alan Bennett's most peculiar play — a rare flop for him when first staged in 1980. Yes, the director, Christopher Luscombe, could see a few empty seats as he thanked the crowd for their hardiness. But even before Monday's opening night, Enjoy had taken almost £1 million after a sold-out regional tour last year. In times of crisis, be they economic or meteorological, we could all do with the evocative energy and finely wrought wit of Bennett at his best.

Alas, Enjoy is not quite that — indeed, for all its inimitable dialogue, for all its prescient satire, it's a pretty bleak evening out. Connie Craven, played with exquisite timing but slightly too many forays into the upper register by Alison Steadman, is a Leeds housewife on the brink of dementia. Her frustrated husband Wilfred, ferociously played by David Troughton, leafs through a sex mag and rues his infirmity. But when a council observer arrives to sit, silently, watching them go about their business — an outlandish exercise in heritage preservation before their street is knocked down — they change. She gets la-di-da — and who can do aspiration better than Steadman? “We get on like a house on fire,” she says, sipping from a china cup. “It's a hellhole!” he insists.

The cast attack the material with relish. But the bleak view of humanity, in which frustration, despair and delusion underlie every aspect of family life, sits heavily alongside Bennett's stylistic audacity. In showing how people change when watched, he undercuts Big Brother two decades ahead of time: “Me alone, in a room,” says Wilfred to the observer. “What's that like? You'll never know.” But the play's absurdism — the identically dressed observers, the blithe treatment of death and prostitution and paralysis — makes this a play of ideas, not emotions. With so many changes of gear, it's not clear what the rules are, and when anything is possible, nothing matters very much, and the characters' callousness starts to cloy.

Janet Bird's set matches the script's mix of the real and the fanciful: a cross-section of the house, beset by Seventies patterns, is marooned midstage. This heightens the sense of these characters as lab rats, but whether you see them as being at the whim of history or of the writer probably determines whether you've bought into Enjoy or not. There's real pain in here, alongside some good gags and a vivid snapshot of harsh industrial life slipping into the speciousness of the service economy. But, by Bennett's standards, it all feels too forced. I can't deny the passion and the inventiveness of it, but I didn't really enjoy Enjoy.

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