OF 47 plays by the bristling voice of Bradford, John Boynton Priestley, many have slipped into the fog of the forgotten but When We Are Married lives on and on. Married and re-married, as it were.

This "clarion call of a good northern comedy" from 1938 called out at York Theatre Royal in May 1968; then August 1985, and now another 17 and a half years later, with a symmetry to match the studiously-plotted construction of Priestley's warmly- witty domestic drama.

When Jim Hooper - Theatre Royal resident director last year, now returning as a freelance - was asked to name the play he wished most to direct, his choice was When We Are Married. "I love old-fashioned plays!" he says.

Priestley had written his spirit-reviving distraction of a play on the eve of war with Nazi Germany, and once more the spectre of conflagration hangs over this production. There is, however, no resonance of military combat within the play. The battlefield here is marriage, the combatants husbands and wives, the drama of snobbery, deception and human fallibility forming a blanket against a wintry chill.

At the West Riding home of done-well Alderman Joseph Helliwell (John Banks), he and his wife Maria (Alison Skilbeck) have been joined by boorish Councillor Albert Parker (Paul Clayton, all pomp and ceremony), crisp wife Annie (Christine Cox) and the Soppitts, reserved Herbert (Eamonn Fleming) and bossy Clara (Sarah Parks), for a joint 25th wedding anniversary celebration.

It is an occasion for too much roast pork and trifle, washed down with port wine and salty, unexpected trouble. Not so much in the erratic behaviour of bibulous cook Mrs Northrop (Joanne Heywood), or precocious housemaid Ruby Birtle (Sarah Miller), or the incursion of Yorkshire Argus reporter Fred Dyson (Michael Charlesworth) and boozy, blurred photographer Henry Ormanroyd (Rod Arthur), but the message imparted by their chapel's southern dandy of a young organist, Gerald Forbes (Alex Kerr).

The village vicar had not been legally qualified to marry them. Scandal! Cue mayhem and the fragrant arrival of showgirl Lottie Grady (Joanne Heywood again, a vision of blonde ambition), to the sight and sound of heads and tables turning.

When We Are Married is a celebration of theatre, and so Sue Plummer's tribute act of a set design is an Edwardian theatre within a theatre. Crimson velvet abounds, period footlights enhance the nostalgia, so too the immaculate costumes and vintage performance style. How fitting the night should end with angels descending to the Hallelujah Chorus from Handel's Messiah. Hallelujah indeed.

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Updated: 09:57 Wednesday, March 12, 2003