WHEN York Settlement Community Players staged The Memory Of Water in October 2004, The Press reviewer wondered why it had not been picked up earlier by a North Yorkshire theatre after winning the Olivier Award for Best New Comedy in 2000.

The reason being that Shelagh Stephenson's dark, sad comedy is set in a seaside bungalow on the Yorkshire coast on a December day and makes reference to a "village near Ripon".

Not before time, ten years later, the New Vic Theatre's touring production makes its way to Scarborough for a staging in the round at the Stephen Joseph Theatre, under the direction of Skipton-born Nikolai Foster, who naturally knows his Yorkshire well, although his cast's accents are almost distractingly varied.

In Northumbrian playwright Stephenson's bittersweet debut play, she takes an uncompromisingly humorous, tender yet regretful look at the complexities of family relationships, grief, and childhood memory as bossy big sis Teresa, over-achieving Mary and attention-seeking Catherine gather at the family home on the eve of their mother's funeral.

These three grown-up, Roman Catholic, squabbling sisters pick at old wounds in an angry and awkward reunion as childhood conflicts re-surface and secrets can be hidden no longer amid involuntary confessions. Settlement director Helen Watson had noted the echoes of Chekhov's Three Sisters, and if there is a connection, it lies in each sister suffering from frustrated hopes.

The root cause was their glamour-puss mother (Lynn Farleigh), who is seen only as an apparition and indeed only by one daughter, Mary (Caroline Langrishe) in a series of meetings that slow director Foster's flow but carry the most weight.

Mother Vi had been suffering from Alzheimer's, but she is not alone in having a failing memory. Stephenson's trump card is in noting how we can all build different memories of the same incident, which in turn leads to conflict, and so The Memory Of Water is not merely a memory play but a false or twisted or deluded memory play.

What is concrete, however, is how the sisters have become who they are. The eldest, Teresa (Mary-Jo Randle) works in the health food and remedy business with her blunted husband Frank (Steven Pinder), and is so embittered from the self-sacrifice of looking after her mother that she and alcohol should never mix.

Langrishe's workaholic doctor Mary has turned middle class through education, but cynicism has eaten away at her brightness and she now longs for a child at 39 with feckless married lover Mike (Paul Opacic), who has had the snip but deserves to be given the chop.

Even more self-obsessed is the needy, most northern Catherine (Amanda Ryan), the little girl lost who protests she is a giver but is a taker. Not least of drugs of the wacky backy variety. No wonder absent latest flame Xavier is on the cusp of becoming the 79th lover to leave her.

Each sister has her defining breakdown moment in the spotlight - always moon-lit rather than sun-lit - that carries an emotional clout, whereas the comic set-pieces of the sisters collapsing in a dope heap and Randle's smashed tirade have not dated so well, feeling theatrical rather than real.

The Memory Of Water, New Vic Theatre, at Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough, 7.30m tonight and tomorrow; 2.30pm, 7.30pm Saturday.