You can love a place and hate it too. Even as you escape it, you feel an undertow dragging you back. Stockport has that power over Simon Stephens, and it has inspired some of his best plays, including Port and Punk Rock. His latest – strange, haunting, hyperreal – is set in Stockport too, a place that in Anna Fleischle's design appears to have been entirely concreted over, as if someone wants to hide a terrible secret. There is a moment when one of the characters tells another that she will chase her out of the town, and it feels as if she has handed down the worst punishment anyone could possibly conceive.
It is 1979: the rubbish is piling up in the streets and the gravediggers are on strike, and when teenage single mother Cathy (Katie West, superb) spies John Connolly (Andrew Sheridan), who claims to be delivering Conservative party leaflets for the upcoming election, it is obsession at first sight. He makes her fizz and buzz and feel as if she has holes in her skin, even though Cathy's mum, Susan (Julie Hesmondhalgh), distrusts him. With good reason, it turns out. Cathy and John lurch blindly towards tragedy. Fast-forward almost 20 years and, with the country on the brink of another momentous electoral change, there is a tiny hint of optimism bubbling up.
This is not a play that you respond to with your brain; it's a play that you feel in your bones. The characters are undeniably odd and yet undeniably alive. Alienated and not always lovable, they are nonetheless compulsively watchable, contrarily human. The writing is like a series of electric shocks. Sarah Frankcom's beautifully acted production – one of her very best – responds in style (there is a superbly staged sex scene) and uses the space to constantly emphasise the gulf between people, and the longing to connect, not just to survive.
• Did you catch this show – or any other recently? Tell us about it using #gdnreview
