ON Thursday, your reviewer went to Bed, then went to bed.

I slept well, save for a strange dream about our hen losing all her feathers when jumping from a high wall, but certainly better than the seven restless occupants of the giant bed that takes up nearly all the Studio floor, out of necessity as much as design by Ruby Savage.

They are not about to take things lying down, although at least they have that option, unlike Sermon Head, a disembodied head sticking out of the headboard in a cap and hoodie.

Cartwright had indicated that all eight characters were elderly, but artistic director Cecily Boys has re-cast Sermon Head as a truculent youth (Richard Demoily), sneering at the Britain and old Brits around him, like a latter-day Johnny Rotten, or maybe a rioter from last summer's street infernos shown on a screen at the start.

There are shades of Samuel Beckett in Sermon Head, but Boys’s interpretation and Demoily’s intemperate oik have given the character a new lease of life, not least in a setpiece when all the cast dances on the bed and as the disco numbers move from the Seventies to more modern times, Sermon Head’s expression changes from contempt to head-banging glee.

While much of Bed is focused on looking back – more of that in the next paragraph – Boys also foresees the upcoming clash between the soon-to-be outnumbered young and the ever increasing elderly population.

Sermon Head physically and metaphorically looks down upon the seven horizontal oldies as they take their turn to re-live their lives, enact their dreams, interact, assist and annoy each other in a nocturnal adventure that glides from monologue to ensemble playing, poetry to song and dance, in an echo of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.

From Richard Easterbrooks’s English motoring gent, Charles, longing for the goggled and gloved days of the open road, to Paul Baxter’s Captain, adrift at sea, and Bernadette Oxberry’s nonplussed nun, the Cassandra-gloomy Spinster, there is a prevailing sense of loss.

The Couple (Kathryn Whaley, Bill Laverick) lose their comfort zone, and if Mandy Newby’s Bosom Lady and her plethora of bras provide Wife Of Bath saucy relief, the overall mood of bedlam, antediluvian attitudes and fear of the future is re-asserted by Barbara Miller’s Marjorie, a Boadicea too old to lead a revolution.

As topical as could be in the year of the London Olympic Games and The Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, Cartwright contemplates the essence of what it means to be British/English and whether that notion of nation is changing, diminishing, diluting, even disappearing.

Savage’s stage, with its climbing wall of British ephemera and past pastimes, adds to the sense of clinging on to the past, and Boys’ excellent direction is typified by her choice of imagery on screen to define what still symbolises Britain to Brits and foreigners alike.

Bed, Old Bomb Theatre Company, The Studio, York Theatre Royal, until March 3. Box office: 01904 623568 or yorktheatreroyal.co.uk