Dad lies in an open coffin in the cluttered mock-Tudor house in which Peter Nichols’s play occurs. His widow, Stephanie Cole’s batty old Maud, chats to the people in the ads on the TV whose sound she has turned off. One of her sons, an antiquarian bookseller played by a slovenly Allan Corduner, sits reading antique porn.

So begins both Peter Hall’s annual season in Bath and, specifically, Stephen Unwin’s lively revival of the most local play the Bristol-bred Nichols has written. Local, because Born in the Gardens was first staged in 1979 as part of the 200th birthday celebrations of Bristol’s Old Vic, and local because it’s set in that city. Local, too, because Nichols has tremendous fun at the expense of Maud, whose oddities include Bristol-accented malapropisms about a changing world she doesn’t understand: “Durex” for duplex, “condom” for condominium. But the play aspires to be more than local, which is where its problems begin.

With Maud’s two other children arriving for dad’s funeral – Miranda Foster’s brash Queenie from her slick nook in Malibu; Simon Shepherd’s pompous Hedley from his MP’s office in Westminster – two main strands emerge and aren’t all that well knitted together. Partly this is a family play, with unhappy memories of dad’s drinking, sibling jealousies reactivated and even hints of incest. Partly it’s a state-of-the-nation play and one that sometimes feels as dated as it’s disenchanted.

There are lines that still hit home, as when Maud, who mostly manages to ignore the fact that Shepherd’s Hedley is a well-meaning but ineffective member of the Labour Opposition, declares that his party “has some very nice people now; they might even be Conservatives”. But the characters’ casual slurs about multiculturalism – though the owner of the corner shop is now “Sabu”, not the original “Sambo” – seem to be more 1979 than 2008. And the disdain for “Dinkytown” London and “sick-man” Britain from that born-again Californian Queenie isn’t now much heard from Americans trying to subsist here on their ailing dollars.

Still, we can’t wholly disown Nichols’s symbolic picture of a fake-Tudor mansion where the geyser keeps exploding and apathy, eccentricity and nostalgia are much in evidence. It would be a deluded Briton who didn’t share Nichols’s infuriated patriotism. It would also be a humourless human being who didn’t laugh a lot, especially when Cole’s Maud is hilariously babbling and burbling about everything, from the mites allegedly infesting her hair to the disappearance of the shops and streets she once loved in Bristol itself.

Box office: 01225 448844

Editor's choice

• Burning Bush with W
• Revolution at the new Saatchi Gallery
• Boy George on sex, drugs and Amy Winehouse