"Everyone is nice on top and rough underneath," says geography teacher Terry to the recently arrived Adrianne collectively unmasking the people who unconventionally frequent her sister's home.
The actual unveiling doesn’t happen quickly in this meandering, seldom seen play set firmly in the late 1970s (when it was written) by award-winning working-class writer David Storey, who has since become dubbed "the Chekhov of the North".
But it's not just Chekhovian bells that ring. Sisters clangs with the burden of references from elsewhere. There is something both kitchen sink-ish and drawing room drama about it, and former footballer Tom, husband to Adrianne's sister Carol, inescapably could have been a contender from the pen of a Yorkshire-born Tennessee Williams.
The helpful Terry also provides some guidance on how to absorb the play with his keen interest in observing how the present grows from the past. He may have been talking about ancient geological formations forcing their way to the surface, but what Storey offers is the buried wounds of the characters rising to meet uncomfortably salty air, whilst the play is itself is performative, challengingly flouting its historical influences.
We learn most about the background of the titular sisters, Carol and Adrianne, who grew up in relative poverty, their father an unreliable breadwinner whom Adrianne takes after and their mother a practical but acquisitive woman who spent what came into the house whose path Carol has followed. Whether it is nature or nurture, one is a pragmatist in the same way that the other is a fantasist.
Now, after nearly two decades apart, during which Adrianne did not attend either parent's funeral, forfeiting an invitation to Carol and Tom's wedding, she is visiting. Inexplicably arriving at their house a day earlier than planned, the London-gentrified Adrianne is increasingly out of place and out of touch in contrast to the easy and grounded men and women who pass through, and it is soon clear that Tom and Carol keep a particular kind of house.
Sisters is of its time and the idea that working class Tom and Carol run a brothel from their council house, or that its patrons include teachers and police officers and all that goes with it, does not have the frisson of impropriety that it most likely enjoyed forty-plus years ago amongst certain middle-class audiences.
Today, it sits more as an intellectually interesting than stretchingly entertaining exercise, and director Elizabeth Elstub is all the more ambitious for having chosen it as the inaugural production for her company, Uncommon Theatre.
Elstub has the pacing right for a play that insists on taking its time, but the period of the setting sits self-consciously over the play with the cast smoking and swigging neat spirits awkwardly, and there are slips in continuity with untasted drinks and a character taking an unlikely exit to leave the house.
Uncommon Theatre was founded by Elstub to support working-class theatre-makers, and they may be better served by writing more recent than this rather difficult piece which is neither a classic, an obscure gem nor searingly insightful.
In its portrayal of people living with the pain of their personal histories, however, it is timelessly relevant and rewarding.