SHELAGH Delaney’s most successful play, written at the age of 19 and first staged in 1958, is so good that it would be difficult to make a bad job of it.

It needs to be staged with the minimum of fuss and Bijan Sheibani, resisting any urge to take liberties with characters, plot or script, has taken great care to invest this National Theatre production with a grittily intimate atmosphere that chimes with the compact surrounds of Trafalgar Studios.

Hildegard Bechtler’s set brilliantly captures the sad, shabbily claustrophobic post-war Salford flat in which mother Helen (Jodie Prenger) and daughter Jo (Gemma Dobson) wage their battles. It’s almost possible to smell the dirty old town outside, with its noxious gasworks, slaughterhouse and canal.

The cast are uniformly excellent, delivering Delaney’s caustic dialogue with a tangible appreciation for its cadences and nuances, though at times in the early exchanges Prenger and Dobson, barely pausing for breath, are rather too quickfire in their delivery.

Yet they prowl around each other to compelling effect as Jo laments privately that her mother has “so much love for everybody else but none for me,” while Helen, forlornly searching for affection in other directions, keeps her hard shell intact almost to the end.

Tom Varey as Helen’s spivvy boyfriend Peter and Durone Stokes as Jo’s sailor fiance Jimmie, never overplay their hand, while Stuart Thompson as the art student Geoffrey, Jo’s saviour in her pregnancy, presents a convincingly conflicted figure who craves love just as much as mother and daughter — and is perhaps also as unlikely to find it.

Runs until February 29, box office: nationaltheatre.org.uk