MIKRON Theatre Company, from Marsden, West Yorkshire, make two visits a year to York as bookends to a summer tour that travels British canals and rivers by narrow boat.

As chance would have it, there was water aplenty at the first show, when rain lashed down on the open-air performance of One Of Each, Deborah McAndrew's fish-and-chips surf wars at the Scarcroft Allotments in May.

Moving indoors for Raising Agents last Sunday afternoon at Clements Hall community centre in Nunthorpe Road, this time water was confined to the obligatory cups of  tea so associated with the Women's Institute, whose centenary is celebrated in Maeve Larkin's entertaining and educational four-hander.

Directed with brisk brio by Marianne McNamara, the same marvellous cast of actor-musicians that so enjoyed portraying the savoury and unsavoury fishy goings-on of One Of Each return in the similarly combative Raising Agents, where the past and the present of the WI become entangled in a squabble over the potential future direction.

On one side are a motivational speaker (Rachael Henley) and one progressive member (Steve McCourt in female mode), calling for the Bunnington WI to be re-named The Bunnies; on the other are two traditionalists, played by cross-dressed James McLean and Ellen Chivers's historian.

Writer Maeve Larkin comments in her programme notes how "women doing stuff without men usually elicits smiles" and reveals how she found the WI a "mass of contradictions" in her research. She duly achieves a delicate balancing in combining humour of the Victoria Wood type with serious points, while addressing the contradictions of being both "grave and gay" in the sparring between the characters' different ideologies.

The clichéd image is of jam and Jerusalem and starchy women, which Larkin debunks, as do the show's witty songwriters, folk duo O'Hooley and Tidow. Far from being behind the times, the WI has been at the forefront of campaigning for votes for women and nuclear disarmament, also giving Tony Blair the slow hand clap before others followed suit.

It may jam yesterday and today for the WI, but who knows what the WI's future holds. We do know, however, that next year's plays by Mikron will address the subjects of chocolate and the Canary Girls of the munitions factories in the First World War. Watch this space for details of their York dates.