A 30-minute play by Shelagh Delaney, hidden for decades, has been released as an audio drama featuring Toby Jones and Rita Tushingham — and it proves to be, in the words of one observer, "a little gem."

The play, titled Catch Me Who Can, deals with a teenage truant. Delaney's daughter, Charlotte, discovered it after her mother's death in 2011 and has now adapted it for audio.

Its long obscurity has a personal explanation. "It imagines my last few hours on the lam having run away from home and school when I was 14 in 1978," Charlotte Delaney said. "I was gone for three days and two nights. I'd suggest it's a racing certainty that the reason nothing has ever been heard of it is that it's about me and my mum had rules about that kind of thing."

The discovery adds a new entry to a bibliography that has long resisted the charge that Shelagh Delaney was a one-hit wonder. The playwright is best known for A Taste of Honey, which Dominic Dromgoole praised for having "a rock-solid heart and the gleam of the natural."

Beyond that landmark work, Delaney wrote the screenplays for the films Charlie Bubbles and Dance With a Stranger, the television series The House That Jack Built and several radio plays.

The new audio version pairs two performers with deep connections to British screen and stage tradition. Toby Jones and Rita Tushingham lead the cast of the adaptation, which runs half an hour.

The play's subject matter draws directly from family history. Charlotte Delaney ran away from home and school in 1978 at the age of 14, staying away for three days and two nights. Her mother's play dramatizes the final hours of that absence.

That autobiographical core, Charlotte suggests, explains the manuscript's silence. Shelagh Delaney, she said, "had rules about that kind of thing" — a boundary against turning her daughter's life into public material. The playwright kept the piece unpublished and unperformed, and it remained unknown even to those familiar with her wider output.

The release of Catch Me Who Can invites a reassessment of Delaney's career arc. A Taste of Honey secured her reputation as one of the defining voices of post-war British theatre, but the newly surfaced work suggests a writer still mining the material closest to her, quietly and without an audience in mind.

With the audio drama now available, listeners can hear a play that was, by Charlotte Delaney's account, effectively withheld from the world by her mother's own discretion — a coda to a career that continues to yield surprises more than a decade after the playwright's death.