COMING Around Again is one of three West Yorkshire Playhouse contributions to Northern Exposure, a festival of new writers and new work from the North.

The Theatre In The Mill, at the University of Bradford, and the BBC are involved too in this showcase for fresh northern flavours.

Chris Thorpe's English version of Ugljesa Sajtinac's darkly humorous Serbian drama Huddersfield is sharing the longest run with Andrew G Marshall's Coming Around Again.

The seven other works, including Crap Dad, Mark Catley's sequel to his 2003 urban drama, Sunbeam Terrace, will fill the diary up to the festival finale on June 18.

Yes, the quality of drama in such festivals can be unpredictable, but nothing ventured, nothing gained. Leeds writer Andrew G Marshall, for example, is being granted the chance to graduate from short plays to his first full-length drama in the interweaving shape of Coming Around Again.

Marshall is also a journalist and short-story writer, best-known for his Psychobabble column in The Times. That establishes him as an observer of life and language and, like many a journalist who has crossed over into other forms of writing, he has drawn on his own life for creative inspiration. "Sometimes the best ideas for plays are literally on your door step. In this case the row of back-to-back terraced houses in which I lived," he writes in his introduction.

So he has set up Coming Around Again as a study of restrictive fathers, loving sons and troubled daughters spread across three time frames and five generations of the same family in the same street in Armley.

In 1910, beautiful daughter Molly (Samantha Power) must tell her stern Irish father Sean (Robert Pickavance) of her pregnancy; in 1960, Lynda ((Susan Twist) struggles to keep family together as heavy-drinking husband Matt (Pickavance again) rubs up against mother-loving son Sean (Nick Moss); in 2004, student Sam (Claire Lams) and boyfriend Billy (Toby Sawyer) seek to start a new life away from her possessive father.

Through the three stories runs Marshall's belief that ignoring the past does not make it go away, and those stories are enacted around each other simultaneously, building up an emotional lattice and a pattern of repeat behaviour in Sarah Penshon's tidy, concise production.

Marshall's domestic drama of hidden desires and dangerous obsessions is more ambitious in its theatrical structure and quick-changing cast requirements than in its slightly pedestrian, workaday dialogue. He is no Alan Bennett, and there is no individuality of writing voice as yet, but Marshall has a grasp of the visual possibilities of theatre.

Coming Around Again, The Armley Story, West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds, until June 5. Box office: 0113 213 7700.

Updated: 09:52 Wednesday, May 26, 2004