Sisters – Jack Studio Theatre, London.

Writer: David Storey

Director: Elizabeth Elstub

David Storey wrote This Sporting Life, played Rugby League for Leeds, and came to prominence in the post-Arnold Wesker/Harold Pinter/John Osborne kitchen-sink school of playwriting. He was also a working-class Yorkshireman from Wakefield and made no apologies for it. His plays are rarely revived, very much a creature of late 60s theatre, and that puts them squarely in the wheelhouse of Elizabeth Elstub and her UNCOMMON THEATRE project. UNCOMMON THEATRE specialises in finding and supporting fresh working-class talent, and putting on work that focuses on working-class experience.

Storey takes two sisters, one staying firmly in the Wakefield of her birth, the other fleeing her roots to seek out the high life in London. The stay-at-home Northern lass is sensible, faithful, no-nonsense, and the part-time madam of a council house brothel. Adrienne, the sister with Southern-tinged aspirations, is nervy, high-strung, elegant, but unsettled. Kitchen sink dramas tend to equate north and solid, south and flighty, and Sisters is a fine example thereof. There is also a selection of brutish men and coping women, with the brutishness being rather too readily accommodated; Storey was a product of his time.

The production offers a naturalistic set, a well-tempered lighting design, a vast array of bottles of booze, and an opportunity for a fine company of actors to inhabit an array of stereotypical northern types. That they make them sympathetic and relatable is a mark of a well-managed show. The only character with no redeeming features is Cracker, played exquisitely by Stephen Guy, who is the most brutish of the brutes. Guy is a horribly forceful presence on stage, which is exactly what he should be. It’s a strong, dynamic performance that allows his fellow actors to discover some layers in their performances; support acting at its best.

The weight of the play, however, falls on the shoulders of the two sisters – Laura Kaye as Carol, the northern lass, and Joanne Arber as Adrienne, all brittle elegance and uncomfortable confessions. Their contrasting presence and layered dialogue are the heart of the play, and their family fondness and sisterly betrayals are the themes the piece explores.

The play has more than a little resemblance to Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire, though Carol’s husband Tom, well-played by Christopher Tomkins, a football star a long way past his sell-by date, is less well wrought than Tennessee Williams’s Stanley Kowalski. The play does suffer from overdone north-south tropes, and it is very much a product of its time, but Elizabeth Elstub and her fine company make it worth the watch, for the sake of theatre history and for the experience of enjoying some high-class acting, especially from Joanne Arber as she traces Adrienne’s precipitous decline.

Runs until 26 April 2025.