Yes, you read that correctly: theatre in a cinema.

Such fare has been done previously by Howard Spencer Mosley at City Screen but this is a new venture for Reel Cinemas.

Encouragingly, audiences built steadily through five nights of performances by Tom Wilson’s Naloxone Theatre Company, and such momentum may lead to Reel Theatre being presented five times a year.

The opening blast – which finished last night – was writer-director Wilson’s tribute to fellow son of Salford John Cooper Clarke in a one-hour show billed as a “lively new comedy”. Lively it was, and loose, and diamond-rough around the edges: the kind of freewheeling theatre, stronger on enthusiasm than technical polish, seldom attempted in York.

The show began with a loud fart: a symbol of the earthy content in store in the sparring of four students (former Stagecoach stand-out Jannah Warlow, Mandip Gill, Haydn Holden and Kesh Sharma).

Wilson’s writing fused the confrontational spirit of The Young Ones and Shane Meadows’ films with the suspicion of Harold Pinter’s bleakly humorous dramas, while his story of “poetry, romance and unrequited recriminations” took in spider poet Cooper Clarke’s relationship with his spaced-out girlfriend, the Velvet Underground’s Nico, followed by his performance at Foo Foo’s Knocking Shop, compered by comedian Hovis Presley (Luke Bailey) and watched by the students on a research mission.

A soundtrack of Joy Division and Sex Pistols B-sides, a knowledge of drug terminology and a love of Cooper Clarke’s poems indicated Wilson’s sense of culture, while Pontefract’s Jaz Martin pulled off an impressive characterisation of Cooper Clarke at only two weeks’ notice and Warlow’s Nico had a fabulously dark-voiced German accent.

There was energy aplenty, even a film scene, but too often The Secret Life was as impenetrable as Cooper Clarke’s shades.