JOHN Godber’s study of love, luck and relationships starts in a familiar place. A man and a woman bicker with the scathing intensity that can grow in proximity’s shadow.

Their banter has an aggressive affection, so that what sounds like hostility is a disguised sort of love.

They are arguing, among many domestic diversions and personal failings, about doing the lottery. And this being a play about lottery winners, they scoop £2 million, but only after a power-cut robs them of the moment. When the lights return, the bubbly is flowing and another couple, the woman’s sister and her lumbering husband, are sharing the fortune – if not the actual money.

From this start, Morris (Gordon Kane) and Jean (Jacqueline Naylor) begin a journey of increasing good fortune, and mounting wins, while finding no great happiness in the gilded process.

What Godber does here, very successfully, is to create a situation drawn from caricature and what seems at first like cumbersome cliché. Yet the real life, and humour of the piece, emerges gradually from the comic weave until what had appeared cartoon-like, in that sturdy northern Hull Truck way, takes on a greater meaning.

On one level, this updating of Godber’s 1995 play, ably and swiftly directed by Nick Lane, is a study of luck, the weight of dreams that are answered, and the burden of unearned wealth.

Yet beyond that, it is mostly about relationships, about not knowing what you have, and how life sometimes only makes sense in chilly retrospect, when it is too late to change anything.

Kane and Naylor pin their roles perfectly as the lucky sods whose good fortune isn’t what it seems. Multi-skilled support comes from Fiona Wass and James Weaver in assorted other roles, including Connie, the lost love Morris runs away with, chasing a dream and finding a nightmare.

Pip Leckenby’s simple, effective set is dominated by a golden cascade of pound signs. Not subtle, but it works.

So what we have here is a play that is at times laugh-out-loud funny, with an undercurrent of seriousness. It remains a bit of a winner.

Lucky Sods, Hull Truck Theatre Company, York Theatre Royal (01904 623568). Thursday, 2pm and 7.30pm, Friday 7.30pm, Saturday 2.30pm matinee and 7.30pm.