The play The Vote, a theatrical experiment broadcast live on television on election night in 2015, is to be revived in updated form this week, playwright James Graham and his co-creator and producer, Josie Rourke, have told the Observer.

Stars Catherine Tate and Mark Gatiss will be back together on the evening of Thursday’s election to perform Graham’s new version along with a full cast, including Bill Paterson and Nina Sosanya, for one night only at Bush House in central London.

The play is set once again in the final 90 minutes of polling in a marginal seat. In 2015, the original Donmar Warehouse production, labelled “a glorious night at the polling station” by the Observer, was broadcast on More4 in real time as voting closed, and was nominated for a Bafta.

Q&A What is a ‘marginal’ seat? Show Marginal seats are parliamentary constituencies that have had a history of changing hands between parties, or in which the incumbent MP has a very small majority. Eleven seats were won by fewer than 100 votes in 2017. Often parties will target marginal seats with extra campaigning resources, as they are the places where they feel they are most likely to affect the balance in the House of Commons. There are several seats, including Kensington, Dudley North, Southampton Itchen and Newcastle-Under-Lyme, where the 2017 margin between the Conservatives or Labour winning the seat was between 20 and 30 votes. The most marginal seat in the country, though, is North East Fife, held by the SNP over the Liberal Democrats by just two votes. A three-way marginal, where the vote has recently been close between three parties, is much rarer.

Election night parties are thin on the ground, and many voters will be looking for distraction. Graham’s play offers a compromise, since the playwright will be asked to read out the exit polls the minute the play finishes at 10pm.

“It is not your average Christmas show, but the strange, twee way we run elections in this country means that many polling stations are in the same places that carol concerts and nativity plays are being staged,” said Graham.

“We wanted to bring people together, and Josie and I also felt that the arts often departs too quickly from the political scene and just hands the baton to journalists and pundits,” he added.

Rourke said: “We enjoyed it so much the first time, we wanted to restage the whole exercise again. But it was fascinating to see what had changed.”

The core mechanics of the play, its elements of farce, have endured, she added, because the key characters – the three clerks in the polling station, and those who come in to vote – are limited in time and space.

“Yet not only was the last time pre-European referendum, it was also at a time when people were still wondering about the possibility of a hung parliament and imagining what chaos that might bring,” said Rourke.

“James is not looking to write a stinging political satire. He wants instead to be fair to all sides and so he remains hidden in the text.”