MARY Shelley wrote Frankenstein at 19. Andrea Dunbar wrote Rita, Sue And Bob Too at the same age. One is timeless; the other is of its time and now looking and sounding dated, 35 years after its debut as the Bradford sink estate teenager's second one-act play at the Royal Court.

It had the shock of the new, the smack of the north, when premiered in the heart of Chelsea by Max Stafford-Clark, and London lapped it up, much as it had savoured the kitchen-sink dramas of Plater, Sillitoe and Waterhouse & Hall in the grey and grainy Sixties.

Coming afresh to Rita, Sue And Bob Too, where does it stand now, with Bradford still not bouncing back? Is it a sort of cult freak show a la Rocky Horror Show, with crude sex, cruder language and a moral vacuum. Is it a distaff Bouncers, John Godber's angry, bleak but brutally funny late-Seventies account of northern nightlife, as witnessed by the four doormen of the apocalypse? Is it the A Taste Of Honey of its day, a play written by Shelagh Delaney at 18 in 1961 and powerfully revived by Hull Truck in 2014?

You sensed that none of these questions mattered to the excited Friday night crowd at a packed-out Cast in Doncaster, where the dominant mood was one of looking forward to a good night out, a laugh, prompted partly no doubt by memories of the 1987 film with the different ending. And yes, they had a laugh, they roared at philandering Bob's bare backside as he took two directionless 15-year-old sink-estate girls for a moorland drive and "a jump" in his car, playing away from home with his teenage babysitters, who are so desperate for affection, attention, excitement, but treat (under-age) sex so matter of factly.

On the one hand, this is frank, fearless, furious, blunt-humoured writing by Dunbar, a semi-autobiographical tale torn from the concrete wastelands of Bradford's Buttershaw estate where she lived. On the other, her rawness means she just presents it as it is, not with a writer's insightful distance or the usual need to comment, unlike Delaney or Godber.

When Sue's potty-mouthed parents (David Walker and Sally Bankes) enter the fray in little more than a swear-off, are we laughing with or at them: these Yorkshire stereotypes of a coarser nature than Monty Python's Four Yorkshiremen skit? Where once the play's crudeness of form, matched by the language, had a visceral clout, now it exposes the limitations of a nascent writing talent.

Kate Wasserberg's touring production is well put together, with good period detail, excellent use of early Eighties hits, the whole cast dancing to Soft Cell's opening Tainted Love, and a set design by Tim Shortall that places the estate tower blocks either side of moorland with a city below, where the lights shine in nocturnal scenes.

James Atherton's shameless, mullet-haired Bob, York actress Taj Atwal's Rita and Gemma Dobson's Sue give it there all, but Rita, Sue And Bob Too's original potency has dissipated, and you are left with "a good night out, a laugh", even in this age of grooming scandals and the dark shadow of Jimmy Savile.

Rita, Sue And Bob Too, Out Of Joint/Octagon Theatre/Royal Court, on tour at York Theatre Royal, until Saturday. Box office: 01904 623568 or at yorktheatreroyal.co.uk