IT is only a short run, three performances in total. No wonder director Caroline Heppell says, “We will just be sorry when it’s over as we’ve all loved working on this fantastic play that much, and we hope we did it justice.”

They certainly did that, judging by the rapturous response to Thursday’s opening performance of Heppell’s revival of Sue Townsend’s play about a neurotic former agoraphobic, Gwenda, who coerces three housebound agoraphobics to join her self-help group to run a church-hall bazaar and rummage sale in Acton, London.

“Contains adult humour, content and strong language,” warns the programme cover. It also contains sentiments on “blacks and why their palms are white” that are frankly excruciating to a modern audience, but that is what Townsend wrote for her Royal Court Theatre premiere in 1982, and Heppell is true to the play’s Eighties’ setting and the blinkered sensibilities of its troubled characters of 30 years ago.

The director chose Townsend’s play because she “writes things just as they are and for that I really admire her”. That writing is unquestionably direct, uncompromising, sometimes too close to sitcom caricature, but full of pathos too, brought fully to the fore by Heppell’s well chosen cast.

A year ago, Chris Higgins played the irresistible force that is Lady Bracknell in Rowntree Players’ production of The Importance Of Being Earnest. Now she rules the stage once more as Gwenda, but for all the snobbery that is reminiscent of Cynthia Bucket too, this is a troubled, bigoted, fearful, bullying character and Higgins captures all that turmoil and bluster.

Mary Louise Surgenor is outstanding as tough cookie, gutter-mouthed Margaret; Nancy Brooks’s ditzy former cabaret turn, Katrina, excels too, and a welcome counter-balance of subtlety comes from Gemma Williams as hygiene-obsessed widow Bell-Bell and Claire Horsley’s bluntly truthful trainee social worker Fliss. Jeanette Hunter’s cameo as a troubled Policewoman is well worth waiting for.

Do get out and see this amusing yet uncomfortable and occasionally shocking slice of Eighties’ life tonight or tomorrow.

Bazaar And Rummage, Rowntree Players, Joseph Rowntree Theatre, York, tonight and tomorrow at 7.30pm. Box office: 07927 026071,rowntreeplayers.co.uk or on the door.