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“We’re in the car, John’s driving, can you hear us?,” she asks.

In the background: “Ey up Nick.”

The second greeting comes from John the driver, Thornton’s husband, writer John Godber.

When we talk the couple are driving not, as you might expect on a Saturday morning, to the tip, supermarket or ferrying children to swimming classes, but on their way to work.

I call the couple from my studio at BBC Radio Leeds, an hour before the first of my two weekend radio shows. I’m used to working weekends, but surely these two don’t need to be at it seven days a week?

“Needs must,” says Godber, with typical brevity.

The couple are in the final week of rehearsals of a new production of the 1984 hit comedy Shakers.

“We did it nearly 40 years ago,” says Thornton.

Godber jumps in: “It were nearly 39 years ago.”

Their conversation sounds like lines of dialogue in a Godber play.

For the record, Shakers was first presented at Hull Truck’s Spring Street home in 1984, 38-years-ago.

“Shakers came about when we did Up ‘N’ Under (the rugby play which won Godber an Olivier for Best New Comedy). We were touring it around the country, a nine-month tour and the lads used to come off stage, get changed and then go back on stage for a late night performance of Bouncers.

“And I ended up washing their shirts.”

There is a moment of silence from the car. The idea of Thornton being happy to wash shirts while ‘the lads’ went back on stage is laughable.

“So we wrote Shakers for the girls who were in Up ‘N’ Under to perform.”The writing duties were literally split between the two of them, they explain.

“Jane would write a scene then I would write a scene and we’d swap them over,” says Godber.

The method worked. Shakers, since 1984, has been performed all over the world, playing for several years in Prague. Thornton went to LA to see a production featuring a then unknown actress called Yeardley Smith - who landed the voice role of Lisa Simpson in the Simpsons while performing in Shakers. The BBC made an on-screen version of the play and it was also nominated for a Writers’ Guild Award.

Now the writers return to the play.

“We wrote a play about what it’s like to have a job at the very bottom of the system,” says Thornton.

“It’s about people who want to get out, but the problem is that there’s nowhere to go,” says Godber.

The working class credentials of both Godber and Thornton are sound, it’s why stories about people who feel like they’re at the bottom of the system are the ones they want to tell - and the ones that still resonate with them.

Shakers is often considered a companion, a sister piece if you like, to Godber’s Bouncers. Like that play, Shakers is a four-hander and tells the story of Adele, Mel, Carol and Nicky, waitresses in the eponymous bar. As in Bouncers, the four actors are called on to play not only the main characters but other ancillary characters we meet in the bar.

“There’s a scene we wrote back then, nearly forty years ago, about how scary it is for a woman to walk home alone at the end of the night and it’s sad and frustrating that nothing has changed, that the play and that part of the story remains as relevant as ever,” says Thornton.

The politics in both the play and in their real lives, which this morning means the car in which they are travelling, are woven through everything.

The conversation turns to the need for drama, as they bring Shakers to audiences around the country on a national tour which starts in Wakefield tomorrow night.

“The arts in the UK are under ideological attack. Funding is being reduced for the arts and when you restrict people’s access to the arts, you restrict their access to something that asks questions, that gives you the ability to ask ‘is this right?’,” says Godber.

Thornton adds: “Staging Shakers is our response to the situation we’re all living through. It’s a good night out that still has something to say.”

Shakers opens at Theatre Royal, Wakefield, tomorrow until Sept 17, then tours. Full details: www.thejohngodbercompany.co.uk