TWO bites at this most juicy of cherries remain in your grasp.

You can either wait until Rutherford & Son completes its tour at York Theatre Royal at the back end of next month, when you also can see Githa, York playwright and actress Hannah Davies’s one-woman show about playwright KG Sowerby, in The Studio.

Alternatively, you could take a trip to the seaside, for fish, chips and a plateful of northern attitude at Scarborough’s SJT. Maybe your choice will come down to whether you prefer a proscenium arch (York) or the greater intensity of The Round (Scarborough).

Given the combative nature of Githa Sowerby’s feminist play, you might assume the round would suit it best, but having seen Isabella Bywater’s dark, heavy set already in the gloomy depths of the Viaduct in Dean Clough, Halifax, and the expansive sweep of the Quarry Theatre at the West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds, it will explode whatever the setting.

Sowerby’s play was set originally in the North East, but in this version, edited for Halifax company Northern Broadsides by Blake Morrison, the portrayal of an industrial Edwardian family on the brink of internecine implosion has been switched to Yorkshire’s West Riding. The year is still 1912, the factory still a glassworks that the intransigent, self-made Rutherford (Barrie Rutter) runs with belligerence, bloody-mindedness and atheist cynicism.

Today you would call him a control freak; in 1912, you wouldn’t dare call him anything… until his family has finally had enough of his bellicosity and strictures.

Sowerby presents a claustrophobic world where the ailing family business feels like a millstone around the neck of eldest son John (Nicholas Shaw), who has been turned a dandy by Harrow education, and has disappointed his father by marrying a London gal, Mary (Catherine Kinsella), dismissed by Rutherford as being beneath his station. John is waiting to sell the business or cash in on a new glass patent before then.

Second son Richard (Andrew Grose) has rebelled by turning to the cloth, to his father’s mockery. Daughter Janet (Sara Poyzer) has held it all in, shrivelled into her 30s, still warming his slippers for the day’s end, but inside she is burning, not with the bitterness of Rutherford’s sister Ann (Kate Anthony), but the heat of frustration at a stymied life.

Without giving away what happens next, save that there is more to foreman Martin (Richard Standing) than meets the eye, the stand-off scene between father and daughter features a turn from Poyzer that should surely bring her a nomination in the regional theatre awards. Kinsella, Shaw and Standing are all terrific too.

Northern Broadsides have rolled out the big guns, not only Morrison and Rutter in his best Broadsides performance in years, but also esteemed director Jonathan Miller, who combines the epic scale of his opera work with the minutiae of domestic detail.

Among Yorkshire business families, Rutherford & Son’s ageless relevance might be too close to home, but what a play, what a performance.

Rutherford & Son, Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough, until Saturday, and York Theatre Royal, May 28 to June 1. Box office: Scarborough, 01723 370541; York, 01904 623568.