MENTION the name Alan Bennett and everyone knows what to expect - or do they?

Enjoy, written in 1980, and playing at Malvern Theatres until Saturday, September 20, will come as a surprise to lovers of Bennett’s closely observed and carefully nuanced writing as it verges on caricature and teeters on the edge of surreality.

Connie and Wilf, whose names have long been forgotten to one another, subsumed by Mam and Dad, live in one of the last back-to-backs in Leeds and they spend their days bickering as they wait for the bulldozers and their anticipated move to a brand new flat. Then an observer arrives from the council, sent to document a way of life that’s about to disappear. Instructed to act normally in the presence of this human fly on the wall, Connie and Wilf’s day becomes anything but normal and their lives are revealed to be a construct of self-delusion.

There is plenty to laugh at in Enjoy, though the humour is created with a broader brush stroke and signposted more clearly than one’s used to from Alan Bennett, and Alison Steadman and David Troughton’s Connie and Wilf are a memorable and credible couple.

Bennett declared that he didn’t know why he called his play Enjoy: “It was just a word I kept hearing,” he explained. “I was so used to writing plays with downbeat endings that I wanted something positive. I also wanted the audience to have a good time, so Enjoy is a kind of invitation to them.”

There is certainly plenty to enjoy in Theatre Royal Bath’s production, but it also contains much that demonstrates why it’s one of Bennett’s least-performed plays.

Enjoy runs at Malvern Theatres until Saturday, September 21. To book, call the box office on 01684 89227 or visit malvern-theatres.co.uk