Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (Colchester)

Alan Sillitoe's novel "Saturday Night and Sunday Morning" captures an aspect of the 1950s which was also explored theatrically by John Osborne and his contemporaries. This dramatisation by Amanda Whittington was originally made for New Perspectives in 2006. Daniel Buckroyd, now artistic director of the Mercury Theatre, Colchester, staged it when running New Perspectives, but his associate director at the Mercury Tony Casement has visited Saturday Night and Sunday Morning afresh for this new Made in Colchester production.

1950s Nottingham, where work for the majority of people meant a factory bench for 50-odd years, is a grim place in Sara Perks' setting – a high framework of girders with a suggestion of the blood-red glow of furnaces below. You can see why disaffected Arthur Seaton (Patrick Knowles) breaks out into liquid and sexual anarchy at the weekend.

Knowles gives a fine performance, letting us see the genuine pain and frustration behind Arthur's callousness. You don't – can't – really like the man, but Knowles lets us at any rate perhaps begin to understand him. Whichever way you look at it, Arthur is a user of people, be they work-mates, "friends" or the women he beds so insouciantly.

We meet three of these. The first is Brenda (Gina Isaac), whose marriage to Jack (Ian Kirby) has staled into a rut. Isaac gives a three-dimensional portrait of a woman grabbing at just a little extra pleasure – and paying a horrible price for it. Winnie (Hester Arden) is a much more savvy person with a love it, take it and leave it attitude to life, which will probably carry her through it unscathed.

The third is Doreen, a pretty blonde in Elizabeth Twells' characterisation, whose gentle niceness conceals a strong sense of right and wrong. Of course, she gets the husband she wants. Whether it will be the marriage she needs is another story.

If one feels for Jack in Kirkby's thoughtful characterisation, then Tim Treslove offers a gallery of trouble, whether the revenge-taking soldier, the drink-sodden navvy or a couple of pub habitués with mouths bigger than their capacity for alcohol. Movement director Lee Crowley uses the Mercury's community chorus to good effect.

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning runs at the Mercury Theatre, Colchester until 24 May.