In his pioneering 1934 travelogue English Journey J B Priestley said "Hull is not really in Yorkshire, but by itself, somewhere in the remote east where England is nearly turning into Holland or Denmark". If this is true of Hull it is even more true of the East Riding, including Withernsea, location of The Kitchen Sink. In Winifred Holtby's "South Riding" (which is of course, the East) the area is portrayed as isolated and deprived where ambitious people arrive only to leave again, and where the poor are living in old railway carriages. Eighty years on has much changed? Not really, if Tom Wells's portrayal is anything to go by. Cath, the mother of our family says to her artistic son Billy "It's a great place to come from, but a terrible place to end up". Her quoting of the local paper's description of Withernsea as "the new Skegness" is hardly one likely to have the tourist board jumping for joy.

Pater familias Martin is a man in crisis. Not the fastest milkman in the west (ask your parents) but the slowest milkman in the east, he is beset by broken parts of milkfloat and the perplexing pathways of his children. He is though, a bit of a dreamer himself and sees his job as a vocation, charting geography - his listing of the roads on his milk round sounds like a parochial version of the shipping forecast, and chronicling history : "Nice shops turn to pound shops, pound shops turn to nice shops. Kids gone off to college, prison ... kids who stick around. Make more kids. More kids who want more milk". A veritable philosopher of the homogonised and pasteurised, Martin and his milk bottles have voyaged for long years like Jason on the Argo. But like the Argo, Martin's milk float is now destined only for heaven and his pressganged Argonaut companions should really be doing other things. Martin is an ordinary man and he knows it, but he is also a good man supportive of his children though he doesn't understand them, hoping that they will make more of their lives than he did of his own. Jonathan Wober was wonderful as Martin, never a gesture out of place or a millimetre out of character. A skillful, funny and moving performance. The scene when he grips the kitchen table to steady himself as the scrap man tows away his float outside was particularly well done.

Martin's wife Cath is more forthright about the couple's shortcomings : " We are essentially hobbits. Aren't we though? Short, and you know, unadventurous. Hairy feet". And yet not so unadventurous; she does a drizzle induced striptease in front of her slightly scandalised husband, shares a joint with her son and daughter's hopeless suitor Pete the plumber and takes a hammer to the perenially misbehaving taps several times. Make no mistake, sushi for Christmas dinner is the act of a daring woman in a Yorkshire household. Sacha Walker brought warmth and quirks to Cath, constantly trying to apply emotional glue to the other characters as she put the kettle on for the umpteenth time. I particularly enjoyed her line when she wanted her husband to curtail his displaced anger "That's enough buttering Martin".

I had assumed that the focus would be mostly on Martin and Cath's son Billy, an artist among philistines, a Dolly Parton fan among those who prefer bangin' tunes. And while we follow his progress to and then back from London art school, he doesn't dominate. As reviewers pointed out at the time of the original production, it is quite refreshing to have a gay character in a play who is not either a caricature, crusading hero, or tragic victim. He just is. There. Part of the family. Failing and flailing with the rest of them. Jonathan Tilley seemed to me to have read the author's intentions well and exercised the correct restraint of his verbal and physical ticks. Unlike his mother's burnt fruit cakes his comedy was never overdone, but just right. His scene with the smoke alarm could have come from the silent movies.

You could describe Sophie and Pete as the other couple of the drama, except that in truth they were not really a couple at all. Joseph Burke's Pete was all unfulfilled desires and unfinished phrases. Hopelessly besotted with Sophie who was trying to find her path out of Woolworths through ju jitsu, he was reduced to being helpful when he wanted to be resolute and red blooded. Perhaps, like his van, he could have done with a bit more colour in his cheeks. Hayley Cameron made Soph ineffably sad and irredeemably angry, keeping her secret well, careful not to overdo her angst and point us in a particular direction before the time was right. She was almost Wells's answer to Holtby's Sarah Burton, helping local girls achieve, but through self defence rather than the classics.

Rob Irvine followed up his directorial debut with another assured ensemble production, drawing us into a small but perfectly formed world which we didn't really want to leave. I don't want to know where Jessica Hammett got hold of those Christmas jumpers, but I'm glad she did. Michael Bettell had created another astonishing set complete with leaky taps, smoking oven and road sign to Driffield and Bridlington. Although the author's profile is obviously modern and egalitarian, I was reminded not of contemporary angst but the work of Stanley Houghton. Family dramas in small spaces, short phrases as important and meaningful as long speeches, nothing overdone but regularly amusing and surprising. As a title The Kitchen Sink might lead an audience to believe they were in for a tough, gritty evening in the theatre, but nothing could be further from the truth. Wells has quoted from the first line of Dodie Smith's I capture the castle and the author is discussing where she gets her best ideas. Always sitting in some place new - this time in the kitchen sink. And the play takes us to some interesting places, but always, inevitably, back to the kitchen sink.

Photography by Ruth Anthony