SHAKERS has been shaken and stirred as often as a dodgem car over the past 24 years, never more vigorously than in 1994 when it was transformed into a musical with 50 per cent new material.

Whatever the refurb, it always re-emerges as the less successful younger sister of John Godber’s Bouncers, applying the same multiple role-playing template while switching from the nightclub to the cocktail bar and from lads to the distaff side.

Whereas Bouncers is re-mixed to move with the times, Shakers 2010 still shows its Eighties roots. The husband-and wife writing team of Godber and Jane Thornton has judged that the Credit Crunch Noughties has echoes of Thatcher’s Britain, so why not leave the play in an earlier era of fears over losing your job and a them-and-us culture of division. Besides, some things have never changed: men still treat women as meat, the boss demanding his cocktail waitresses show ever more leg.

Pip Leckenby has gone for Roman columns and a neon sign, all very Duran Duran video for the retro set design, while the girls are kitted out in white shirts, black skirts and leggings (very 2009, as it happens) with red cloths draped from the waist. As for props, they are as thin on the ground as they are in Bouncers: only four chairs in matching red – oh and a faux Christmas tree to signify it’s Noddy Holder time again.

The waitresses were four, and now they are five in director Godber’s latest re-write, with another girl allowed, fresh out of drama school in her professional debut. After impressing as the understudy on tour, Amy Walsh, younger sister of Girls Aloud’s Kimberley, has been promoted to the cameo role of novice waitress Janice, a gobby young temp hired to stem the rising Christmas tide. Loose of tongue and lax of attitude, Janice is a fore-runner of today’s Chav ladettes and Walsh certainly has a laugh with her brash creation.

The focus remains largely on the regular four, however: the overworked, underpaid, squabbling quartet of working mum Adele (Liz Carney), very grumpy Mel (Claire Eden), topless-dancer-in waiting Nicky (Pippa Fulton) and feminist student Carol (Annmarie Hosell).

As with Bouncers, they play myriad additional roles too: four girls on the 21st birthday razz; four smug southern chaps on the cash-splash; a couple of theatre snobs and other assorted braying types. The social stereotypes are too forced here, and too much stand-around chatter makes the first half drag.

The balance between chat and action improves after the interval, the monologues have more impact too, and there is an in-joke echo in the girls’ party ending up at the Mr Cinders nightclub, home of the Bouncers of course.

It makes you wish for the extra bounce of that Godber classic, but while Shakers will always be the doppelganger follow-up single to a number one hit, it is a better play for its latest (cocktail) shot in the arm.

Shakers, Hull Truck Theatre, until January 16. Box office: 01482 323638.