Fourteen Again review – make a new musical out of Victoria Wood’s warmly witty songs? Let’s do it!

Marking 10 years since the late comic’s death, this affectionate show blends her songs with a time-slip tale of friendship, regret and middle age

This Lake District venue was called the Old Laundry theatre before it was recently renamed in homage to Victoria Wood. The late performer, writer and lyricist would surely have loved that former title: she made an art out of portraying female domesticity and the foibles of ordinary people with humour and compassion.

Marking a decade since Wood’s death, this new production interweaves 12 of her songs with a story about two women, disappointed in middle age, who meet in a diet club. Wood so often pilloried the weight-loss industry and this setup seems designed to showcase her song Don’t Get Cocky, about diet culture. Peggy (Sally Ann Triplett) and Lou (Ria Jones) reminisce over their school friendship and speak ruefully of the disappointments that followed in their lives. Then Peggy finds herself waking up in the past, aged 14 again. She decides to make better choices this time around.

As an ode to the past (alongside female friendship and midlife, which were repeated themes across Wood’s writing), it initially comes across as a nostalgia fest, over-familiar and slightly ersatz with mentions of Basil Brush, Nana Mouskouri and Bejams as well as, of course, Women’s Weekly from Wood’s magnificent The Ballad of Barry and Freda (AKA Let’s Do It). The screens at the back of the circular set bear naff illustrations and the plot is like a bastardisation of Freaky Friday and Back to the Future.

But if director Jonathan O’Boyle’s production feels a little clunky at times, Tom MacRae’s book (with some additional lyrics) is winning. Then there are Wood’s glorious songs that remind you of her extraordinary range, some giddy with domestic delights, others turning to melancholy matter. They capture a voice, in their pathos and bathos, that could be Philip Larkin in musical form with its focus on ordinariness, and the depth to be found in it, as well as themes of loneliness, quiet dissatisfaction and ageing.

There is some sharp satire around class and regionalism in the number Northerners, which is up there with Pulp’s Common People or an Arnold Bennett satire. This is followed by an astute observation of women’s unfulfilled sex lives in I’ve Had It Up to Here (Triplett sings this as a teenager, cabaret style, with a hairbrush as her mic) and the darker Litter Bin, about motherhood and abandonment.

Both actors worked with Wood and infuse their performances with warmth, Triplett wearing a 1980s side ponytail, Jones sporting a Kevin Keegan-style mullet. The songs are so eternally Wood’s that sometimes you hear her unmistakable exuberance. But Triplett and Jones gradually make them their own, bringing wit and emotion too.

Triplett mixes teen angst with no-nonsense menopausal spirit and Jones is as strong in her performance of straight-up adolescence. Michael Chance juggles the smaller male roles and doubles up as pianist. It is silly to see midlife actors playing teenagers so archly but it builds emotional momentum nonetheless. By the end, you are crying for these women as well as the genius who died too early but left us her songs.

• At the Victoria Wood theatre, Bowness-on-Windermere, until 6 June