Morris Panych’s play, here in its UK premiere, is set in the downstairs section of a smart restaurant (a neat, true-to-life suitably depressing set by Matthew Wright) where the dishwashers live, workers the upstairs customers know nothing about.

This section of working society were the “plongeurs”, amongst whom George Orwell worked, and who he described in his book Down and Out In Paris and London.

Dishwashers are also people whose hands are ruined by continually being plunged into hot, detergent-laden water, a point brought out here by one of the characters.

Panych tells us in a programme note that he is concerned (or interested) in entitlement and privilege and, in a ponderous and slightly dull first act, we hear of the downward spiral of Emmett, a young man who has enjoyed social privileges and an affluent lifestyle in what we vaguely suspect to be the finance business.

But his finances have crashed and when we see Emmett, he is the third man in the team of dishwashers.

Here he is without a name, or history, he is merely the “new boy” dressed in a previous worker’s ill-fitting overalls, the dogsbody at the beck and call of the overbearing, sarcastic Dressler (David Essex inaudible in act one, better in act two).

Dressler is a man who may possibly have a heart of gold, but of which there are few signs here, except a kind of compassion for the third man, the seriously ageing, Moss, a crumbling relic, eking out his last days in this grimy, steamy, shabby hell-hole.

The second act livens up a little and you get a tiny flavour of Beckett’s sublime slapstick world of the downtrodden clown which is at the heart of his Waiting For Godot, a world where, as here, the under-class fights back. Although winning is not guaranteed.

For Moss, who has suffered badly from a recent enema, something he got for free by winning a prize in a chemist shop competition, it is all over.

But Emmett, (the admirable Rik Makarem who takes the acting laurels) alert, and good looking, finding a wealthy girl is not a huge problem.

Emmett moves back upstairs, clutching a Champagne bottle, into the lifestyle he knew before.

Only Dressler remains, bullying a new, young plongeur, a last reminder that life is totally unreliable, and that for Panych, at least, your second act can carry you through.

• Runs until February 15. Tickets and details are available at the Birmingham Rep website.