IN a first for Hull Truck Theatre, the company is marking its 40th anniversary by employing a repertory company of actors to perform two “very different” plays in tandem over a six-week season.

Once Upon A Time In Wigan, “The Story of Northern Soul”, has completed its first run with further shows to follow from February 13 to 15 and February 23 to 25; Hull Truck and Paines Plough’s co-produced world premiere of Matt Hartley’s Sixty Five Miles, “The Soul of A Northern Family”, will have main-house slots from Wednesday to February 11 and February 16 to 22.

Both are directed by Paines Plough’s co-artistic director, George Perrin, and designed by Amy Cook, and it is to be hoped that Sixty Five Miles makes a better impression than Mick Martin’s episodic eulogy to the Wigan Casino, home to the euphoric underground sound of Northern Soul from 1973 to 1981.

The trouble with nostalgia for such a cult phenomenon is that you really had to be there in the first place. The second-hand experience is no substitute, a panacea that can’t replace the real thing.

The show spends all its time trying to tell you what you missed without ever quite convincing you that what you missed was so special, or why, once the Casino closed, the disciples of Gloria Jones’s Tainted Love etc felt so bereft without their weekend all-nighters.

Shimmy Marcus’s 2010 film, SoulBoy, related much the same tale – the rites of passage of a Stoke teenager whose humdrum Seventies’ life is suddenly suffused with hopes and dreams on trips to Wigan – but its script was too prosaic.

Martin’s focus falls on narrator Eugene (Alan Morrisey), an 18-year-old lad with no romance to counter the 9 to 5 drudgery, who is transported to another world by the moves, the sounds, the sweat, the clothes, the talcum-powdered dance floor of the holy grail, the Wigan Casino.

There, Eugene falls for confident Maxine (Katie West) but the path of true love over five years is never smooth etc etc; awkward Suzanne (Becci Gemmel), meanwhile, is drawn to Danny (Craig Els), who is too into his Northern and too out of it to notice.

You feel indifferent, as distant as Wigan. Martin’s writing doesn’t help: occasionally witty but largely hackneyed and too simplistic, it can’t match the soul power of the music and the cast has too much space – and not enough personality – to fill on a totally bare stage.

The dance scenes are no better. Bolstered by youth theatre members, they amount to watching people dancing to records, a repetitive sensation that cannot compete with the impact of musical performers singing on stage.

“Northern? Once you get it…no going back,” reads the brochure’s enticement to see Martin’s cult play.

Alas, you won’t get “it” from a show that is more myth than hit, leaving you feeling, “What was the fuss?”

Box office: 01482 323638.