There's a rare chance to see the 1930 comedy by E M Delafield, To See Ourselves, at Kennington's White Bear Theatre.
From the same pen as novel The Diary of a Provincial Lady, this play also concerns itself with tenderly satirising the middle-class, with an undertow of the era's social ferment and a sharp dig at marriage.
With their two sons away at school, Caroline is left alone with her dull and disengaged husband, Freddie, ensconced in a small town in Devon near to his family business. Without a wireless or gramophone, her existence is comfortless and uneventful, and her vivid imagination torments her with dreams of moments in the spotlight and a generally more fulfilling life.
Contrary to Caroline, whose identity is defined as much, or more, by her husband's, than her own self-regulation, her sister is independently minded and self-determining.
Jill is Caroline's junior by ten years, but they appear a generation apart. As well as the immediate impetus to improve the lot of the unfulfilled and stifled Caroline, city-dwelling Jill has a job, ambitions and a liberal outlook that provides its own dilemmas, including will or won't she marry boyfriend Owen with whom she is visiting her sister.
Delafield writes the women with more compassion than she has for the men who, as a cohort, come in for a fair amount of witty stick, often condemning themselves from their own mouths; "why should I take notice of you, you're my wife" says the emotionally wooden Freddy to the romance-deprived Caroline.
Up a level, though, there is something Wildean about Jill's socially subversive views, her matter-of-fact "indiscreet questions are the only ones worth asking" could almost be a line from The Importance of Being Ernest.
The performances are patchy, and director Luke Dixon's blocking is occasionally blunt, hinting at too little rehearsal time, which also leaves the least rounded character of Freddie (Jonathan Henwood) out on a limb.
Becky Lumb finds a charmingly baffled Caroline, wide-eyed as if wondering how she ended up locked into a routine where the arrival of the fish and the retaining of domestic staff dominate her day.
Rebecca Pickering is a spirited, clearly delivered, forward-thinking Jill with Jonathan Davenport as her beau, an affable Owen moulding his shape to match this modern woman.
Their intertwined stories of one age group living within the boundaries challenged by the next is a pattern that is repeated all over literature; what differentiates this from some reenactments is that Delafield has found the drawing tragedy that lies underneath the domestic comedy.