YOU can take this bullish revival of John Godber’s updated Office Party on surface level and nod in amused recognition at the festive party shenanigans and the morning-after headaches.

Or you can look deeper and detect the whiff of office politics bubbling away at a theatre rife with rumours. Not only has Neil Sissons ended up directing this production, but run your eye down the programme’s Staff List and you will note the sudden absence of Godber, Mr Hull Truck for so long.

He has decided to leave his post as creative director, at the end of a year when Andrew Smaje has taken up the reins as chief executive. This is not the place for in-depth conjecture as to what will happen next – will the newly freelance Godber continue to present premieres at the new Hull Truck or transfer his allegiance to Wakefield Theatre Royal? – but you could read an unspoken subplot into the spanner-in-the-works finale to this bitter, re-written play.

Before the storm clouds gathered, the talking point might have been Hull Truck’s expedient decision to follow film companies in using product placement, after professional recruitment consultancy Edwards & Pearce agreed to sponsor the Christmas production in exchange for their name being interwoven into Godber’s dialogue.

It will be interesting to see if other theatres follow suit in the new age of funding austerity when cuts – such as Hull City Council’s decrease of £100,000 for Hull Truck – will force them to find new ways of raising finance.

The sporadic mentions of Edwards & Pearce are less significant, however, than Godber’s decision to move the setting forward from 1992 to 1998, one year into the new dawn of New Labour.

“This seemed the perfect opportunity to look at the concept of change and the nature of image,” says Godber in his programme interview. “Change” is represented by the new arrival in the office of Chapman and Howard, a Leeds company in the traditionally London-centric advertising industry, where the exposed brick walls in Pip Leckenby’s set pass for cutting-edge fashion on the cheap.

Everyone is expecting the newcomer to be a man, from self-made boss Gavin (William Ilkley) to grouchy, errant Bob (Jim Kitson); dippy receptionist Pippa (Pippa Fulton) to puppy-dog graphic designer Lee (James Baxter); office punchbag Andy (Leigh Symonds) to weary dogsbody Patty (Jackie Lye).

He turns out to be a “she”, Jo (Beatrice Curnew), a London hotshot charged with landing a key account, and the winds of change duly turn into a maelstrom with the drunken staff party at the epicentre.

All the office-party clichés are here, photocopied body parts et al, observed by Godber with the brisk physicality of his early plays, allied to brooding, darker social comment.

This is socialist Godber at his most blunt yet sharp: contemptuous of London duplicity and back-stabbing interference and dismissive of advertising’s superficiality (and in turn New Labour spin), as a shallow world crashes on the rocks of one hell of a party.

* The Christmas Office Party, Hull Truck Theatre, Hull, until January 15 2011. Box office: 01482 323638