THE Press first caught this touring production in its opening week at Hull Truck Theatre in April and the last drip of honey can be tasted at York Theatre Royal in the closing days of its spring and summer tour in July. Never sweet in the first place, it has grown even more bitter in the subsequent weeks as the performances have sourly matured.

The production carries particular significance as it is the inaugural chance to gauge what lies ahead for Hull Truck under new artistic director Mark Babych, an experienced hand with more than 100 professional productions to his name, most notably in ten years in charge of the Bolton Octagon.

Such grounding in the world of repertory theatre, albeit increasingly in co-productions such as this one with Derby Theatre, gives him every chance of pulling off his most important task: giving Hull Truck an identity that became lost in the transfer to the Ferensway building.

This does not mean re-fitting the Truck in its old livery defined by John Godber's plays but it does entail acknowledging that Hull is in the north and has particular characteristics that Godber identified so well.

Babych's first step into the future goes back to the past, not only in his choice of A Taste Of Honey, Salford playwright Shelagh Delaney’s1958 teenage drama written when she was only 19, but also in its characteristics as a northern, working-class drama with shards of brittle humour. The kind of play that writer-director Godber or cohort Gareth Tudor Price might have put on in their halcyon Hull Truck days to complement Godber's physical social comedies and Nick Lane's playful children's shows or adult reflections on childhood memories.

Babych must mark his new territory in his own style too but one immediately distinctive feature is his employment of actor-musicians James Weaver, Lekan Lawal and Christopher Hancock. They double as a skiffle band to entertain the audience pre-show and post-interval, as well as when linking scenes with love songs and crooner tunes of the kitchen-sink period.

Julie Riley had tended toward caricature as errant mother Helen in Hull but now her hellish Helen is every ageing inch as grotesque, desperate and selfish as Brenda Blethyn'sMari Hoff in Little Voice. Shameless star Rebecca Ryan is still terrific as pregnant teen Jo, wilful and wounded, wound up and thrashing around without a compass, while Hancock gives the second half the counterbalance it needs as pansy art student Geoff, who is equally struggling to work out what love is in dirty, smelly, claustrophobic Salford.

Lawal's passing-ship-in-the-night lover, Jimmie, is a big man who can nevertheless float like Cassius Clay and the performance that has leapt to the fore since Hull is Weaver's Peter, a lascivious lush with the menace of a constant jab and the irritation factor of a dawn cockerel at the weekend.

A Taste Of Honey, Hull Truck Theatre/Derby Theatre, York Theatre Royal, until Saturday. Box office: 01904 623568 or at yorktheatreroyal.co.uk