It was the first time that I’d sat in a theatre and played bingo, but then it was the first time I’d seen a theatre converted into a northern bingo hall: fruit machines at the entrance, grotty carpet, 13 women and two men hunched over little desks, the audience joining them in competing for the big one, meaning £200. I’d better admit right away that I was among the 609 losers, but still left full of admiration for the funny, touching, atmospheric and surely very realistic piece that Neil Bartlett has written and directed for Manchester’s International Festival.

The presiding genius is Ian Puleston-Davies’s Frank, who stands at his lectern calling numbers and chatting to the regulars in his saloon-bar voice. And sometimes he leaves this de facto pulpit to draw glum parallels between bingo and life: “We all need practice at losing”, “Sometimes there’s no prize but you still play”, etc. That could seem obvious and become laboured, yet somehow it doesn’t. It’s his Eeyore’s-eye-view of deftly individualised punters with their own forlorn needs: money to see grandchildren in Australia, or to help to pay off debts that are straining a marriage, or to buy presents for “my boys”, or sad this, or pointless that.

From Joan Kempson’s creaky, half-incontinent Elsie to Sally Bankes’s hilariously coarse, quarrelsome Maureen, most are clearly escaping loneliness by entering into what becomes a kind of secular communion. And every so often they launch into a chorus that owes something to church ritual, something to T. S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral or Family Reunion: “We believe in the special offer, in the big win, in the spending to come”, “Forgive us for wanting it as we forgive those who win it without deserving it”, “We believe in the maybe, in the one day maybe, we believe in the uphill struggle and in tomorrow.”

And, yes, you do believe that life will remain a struggle: for these dogged losers and occasional, momentary winners; and especially for Puleston-Davies’s superbly observed Frank, who has spent the past 21 years honing his cynicism, inexplicably hating to call the number one, and putting up with Sally Lindsay’s reproachful manager and her helpers, who launch into naff song and dance routines. Is it pushing parallels too far to say that he could have stepped out of a Beckett play and, indeed, that Beckett himself would have relished Bartlett’s bingo games? Not really.

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