Matt Trueman: Should we update recent plays?

Theatre is a present-tense art form. It exists in the here and now: a public event in the world as it is. That's a great part of its power. Precisely because of that fact, theatre is – arguably more than any other art-form – engaged in a dialogue with its past. It has to constantly reinvent itself. To revive a play is to bring it back to life. That means not just getting it back on its feet, but re-energising it.

Watching Blue/Orange at the Young Vic last week, I was surprised at how dated it felt. Having premiered at the National in 2000, Joe Penhall's play is only 16 years old – far younger than the Pinters and Hares that come round so often. It's dissection of institutional racism remains acutely relevant in a society in which one in four prisoners comes from a BAME community, and yet still it felt tired. (Most of my critical colleagues, I should say, disagree on this front.)

Partly, I suspect, it's a matter of memory. I saw the original production on its West End transfer, at the age of 16 – a particularly formative time in my theatregoing. A decade and a half on, the three performances – Chiwetel Ejiofor, spitting with rage; Bill Nighy, louche as a lounge lizard; Andrew Lincoln, desperately playing it cool – are firmly lodged in my mind. They are, however, distilled down to images, moments and gestures standing in for performances. The same's true of the play. In my head, it has been compressed and compacted into something it's not: a sensation of watching, gripped by the car crash of colleagues. The ferocity of its climactic detonation remains, where the build-up doesn't.

However, a bigger part of the problem, as I wrote in my review, is that Penhall's play has become a period piece. It runs deeper than the smoking indoors and a pre-Westfield Shepherd's Bush. What was once pinpointedly topical has become somewhat historical. Three months after Blue/Orange premiered, a study by the Institute of Psychiatry found that Afro-Caribbeans were six times more likely to be diagnosed as schizophrenic than their white counterparts, causing New Labour's mental health czar to admit the system was institutionally racist.

Might more recent plays benefit from a retune?

That problem hasn't gone away, nor is institutional racism confined to mental health, but Penhall's play has lost its prescience and, with it, some of its power. In terms of race relations and multiculturalism, we have come a long way in 15 years. Problems persist, of course, but the some of the doctors' actions and attitudes – the ickiness of assuming all black men like reggae, for instance – now look positively retrograde. That allows us a safe distance, perhaps even a slight superiority, meaning that a white audience today needn't feel quite so implicated. Distance lets us off the hook.

Mostly, though, it's a matter of time. It's often said that the way we watch has changed; that our ability to make narrative connections has improved in a world of multiple tabs and multi-layered box sets. Against that, Blue/Orange seemed slow and repetitious. It struggles to justify its two hours of stage-time. Were it written today, I suspect it would come in at 90 minutes – no interval – just as Mike Bartlett's Cock and Bull both did.

It has become the fashion to update old classics – whether that be squishing together DH Lawrence's mining plays, as Ben Power did in the National's Husbands & Sons; ripping out the middle of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, as in Colin Teevan's adaptation; or rewriting wholesale as in Suhayla El-Bushra's spin on The Suicide or Robert Icke's version of Vanya. The aim is always to pull the play into the present – be that in terms of setting or structure – rewiring them to restore their dramatic potential.

Might more recent plays benefit from the same treatment? Not a rewrite per se, but a retune. Working with Joel Horwood as dramaturg, Simon Stephens tweaked certain elements of Herons when the Lyric Hammersmith presented it earlier this year, sometimes drawing out different meanings altogether. In the original, East End lad Billy is raped with a beer bottle – a symbol of loutish masculinity – but the update swapped that item for a golf club – an object that comes with connotations of class and gentrification. Other plays have flexibility written into them. Anthony Neilson's Penetrator, first performed in 1993, invites directors to swap specific cultural references for their own. "You could choose to keep it as it is and treat the play as period," he writes in a textual note, "or you could substitute another item of topical news."

Maybe, though, this is less a question of revival culture and more of new writing – the sorts of plays that get staged in the first place. That push for prescience, the expectation that playwrights take the temperature of the times, might mean that British theatre sacrifices universality for immediacy. There's a reason, after all, that so few new plays get revivals – even regional premieres a year or two later. A present-tense art-form inevitably has a short shelf-life.