Steven Berkoff described his 1975 play East as an “elegy for the East End and its energetic waste”. He was born and raised in Stepney, east London, and the streets of his youth had already passed into history, bulldozed by postwar planners and social change. But East is making a comeback. This month, Berkoff’s scabby razzle-dazzler about a family living on a council estate returns to the King’s Head in Islington, where it made its London debut 43 years ago. The test for director Jessica Lazar is whether she can make it seem more than a linguistically acrobatic period piece written by a man who is better known by many as a villain in Bond, Rambo and Beverly Hills Cop movies.

“It’s one of those plays that everyone thinks they know,” says Lazar, “and it feels as if it’s staged a lot. But when you ask people if they’ve seen it, the answer is mostly no.” That doesn’t mean that they don’t have strong opinions on how it should be staged. “It can be a bit of a ball and chain,” Lazar admits. “The challenge is finding where to pay court to the past and where to aim for something original.”

East was wildly audacious in its time for its depiction of working-class lives. Bad boys Mike and Les (Leslie is Berkoff’s birth name) strut across the stage in an explosion of poetry and violence. Their racist dad wallows in nostalgia for an England where Oswald Mosley and his blackshirts marched in the East End, while mum daydreams about a different life – in which Ernest Hemingway admires her poetry. Mike’s much-abused girlfriend, Sylv, considers how much better her life would be if she had been born a man.

The vibrant, textured language, which makes it sound as if Shakespeare has collided with an unexpectedly rich and riotous contemporary argot, is invigorating. One critic described it as “filthy beyond the call of duty”, and with its liberal use of expletives it would never have satisfied pre-1968 theatre censorship.

But for many of the UK’s younger theatre-makers, Berkoff’s play – in part because it continues to be taught on theatre studies courses – is very much a point of reference for the way that it melds text with explosive physicality. Berkoff trained at Jacques Lecoq’s L’École Internationale de Théâtre long before a generation of theatre-makers, including Complicite’s Simon McBurney, made their pilgrimage to Paris.

As Soho theatre’s artistic director, Steve Marmion, says: “Berkoff and East were the precursors of companies such as RashDash, Frantic Assembly and Gecko.” Such companies may not be directly influenced by Berkoff’s distinctive and often grotesque mime style, but his physicality and total theatre approach paved the way for current contemporary theatre practice and has been as much a landmark for many as John Osborne and Harold Pinter were for an earlier generation.

Berkoff’s works may have been overlooked in books about post-war British theatre by academics and critics over-schooled in the idea of theatre as a primarily text-based medium, but the influence of his sinewy language can be detected on practitioners including the In-Yer-Face generation of playwrights of the 1990s, most obviously Jez Butterworth.

Now things come full circle. While Lazar is in rehearsals at the King’s Head, Elliot Warren and Olivia Brady of Unpolished Theatre are preparing to take their East homage, Flesh and Bone, to the Adelaide fringe in Australia before bringing it to London later in the year. Flesh and Bone was a big hit in Edinburgh last summer. For the first 10 minutes of the show I sat pretty much with mouth agape at what appeared to be a blatant Berkoff rip-off. Then I started to appreciate how cleverly this young company had taken inspiration from Berkoff’s original and made it their own – with a distinctively 21st-century spin.

Lazar argues that part of East’s enduring appeal is the fact that the characters are “eternal archetypes” and is aiming to give Berkoff’s play a timeless quality by nudging it out of the mid-70s towards our own time. “It’s not clearly set in 2017, but if the cast were to walk down Upper Street in Islington in their costumes nobody would bat an eyelid,” she says. With Flesh and Bone, Warren and Brady reinvent those archetypes and relocate them to an East End tower block that the local council is trying to decant as part of gentrification. Marmion says that Flesh and Bone “sits very potently in the shadow of Grenfell Tower”.

Originally, Warren and Brady had wanted to stage East, but the rights were prohibitively expensive, so Warren – raised, like Berkoff, in the East End – set out to write his own play about the area. In Flesh and Bone, put-upon Sylv is reincarnated as businesslike Kel, who runs a phone sex line, and the unspoken crisis of masculinity that goes with the appalling misogyny of Berkoff’s Mike and Les becomes intriguingly multilayered, with new characters whose sexuality and hard-man reputations are put under the microscope.

“Yes, Berkoff was a strong influence, but so were Shakespeare, Guy Ritchie and Quentin Tarantino. Jez Butterworth’s Mojo and Jerusalem in particular,” says Warren. “We wanted to make something that moved at breakneck speed and that people couldn’t look away from. With lots of theatre, after 60 minutes people are losing the will to watch. We wanted to hook them.”

They do, and in the process ensure that Berkoff’s influence endures. Warren and Brady are hoping that Berkoff will come and see the production at Soho theatre this summer. They invited him to see a tryout last year, but he couldn’t make it. “He said he was going to the Bahamas,” says Warren. That’s a very long way from Stepney.

• East is at the King’s Head, London, from 9 January to 3 February. Flesh and Bone will be at Soho theatre, London, this summer. Dates to be announced.