You might think that a play about the objectification of women, about how pornography can cause men to commit acts of sexual violence, would speak urgently in our current climate of heightened and complex gender politics. But Sarah Daniels’s 1983 work, once hailed as a classic of late-20th century British theatre, feels suspended in the era in which it was created, a time when UK pornographers were turning their backs on the dirty mac brigade who frequented Soho flea pits and plying their trade via the burgeoning home video market. This is a world where middle-class men make casual rape jokes at dinner parties and women in the workplace are expected to subjugate themselves to the sexual whims of their male bosses.

That is not to say Masterpieces, getting its first London revival and kept sensibly in its early Eighties setting, is not a work of considerable skill and admirable fire, but it is hard to find any exigent rhetoric in Melissa Dunne’s slightly hesitant production.

Rowena (Olivia Darnley) is a social worker married to a misogynistic bore (Edward Killingback), who, in finding a legitimate office job for prostitute client Hilary (Tessie Orange-Turner), gradually becomes aware of the way so many women (particularly those who, unlike her, haven’t had the benefit of a pukka education) become trapped by predatory male behaviour.

Interspersed with this story, which is enacted through conversational scenes of a slightly too schematic nature, are rather more revelatory monologues. We hear from a man who made his fortune in the pornography business, from Rowena’s friend, Yvonne (Orange-Turner again), whose fight to join the middle classes has not been entirely successful, and from a hawker who gleefully acknowledges his insider knowledge of customers’ peccadilloes.

Dunne never quite controls the many scene changes and is too reliant on an (admittedly killer) Eighties soundtrack which too often interrupts the dramatic fluidity. More successful is Verity Quinn’s set design which displays a mood board of Eighties pornographic magazines behind a row of frosted blinds much beloved of sex shop proprietors.

The cast of six take on multiple roles to varying degrees of success. Given that the men are all almost unfailingly sneering and preening one-dimensional horrors, it is unsurprising that the female performances are more memorable. Orange-Turner is particularly adept at switching from the sensible Yvonne to the sexually misused Hilary, while Darnley expertly conveys Rowena’s righteous rage (even if she seems slightly too Mallory Towers to watch a snuff movie and then take it out on a stranger who tries to grope her at Finsbury Park tube).

Masterpieces may not live up to its name – it is fitfully structured and at times far too self-conscious – but I was left in no doubt that this is an important and provocative work which shows how radically male vocalisation of misogynistic desire has changed in the past 35 years. The depressing thing is that we know, beneath the surface, it still exists.

Until May 19. Tickets: 0844 847 1652; finboroughtheatre.co.uk