FILM screenings have tended to dominate the recent programming up all those flights of stairs in the McCarthy theatre at the SJT, so the return of greasepaint to the top floor is welcome.

Furthermore, artistic director Chris Monks wants the plays on this thrust stage to be distinctive from the dramas performed in The Round below. It is a chance to experiment, to shine a light on lesser-known works, he says.

Hence his choice of a comparatively minor David Mamet work, a chamber piece of female verbal cut and thrust where the language is flamboyant, fragrant and occasionally surprisingly frank, jolting you with its out-of-step modernity.

Monks has been drawn to Boston Marriage partly because its cast of three is entirely female, against the tide of previous Mamet plays where masculinity prevailed.

The play’s title indicates the focus will be on the feminine: the term Boston Marriage is taken from Henry James’s The Bostonians and denotes the act of two women living together. In this case those women are two scheming American ladies prone to prattling as they battle for supremacy in a chintzy drawing-room comedy that harks back to the elegance and eloquence of Oscar Wilde.

Anna (Julie Jupp) is the older of the two and is parading her new trophy, a bling-sized emerald necklace that signifies her status as the mistress of a wealthy man, with a lavish income to match. Claire (Lisa Stevenson), meanwhile, has acquired a new lover, a respectable young lady, her infatuation sparking jealousy in Anna.

So begins Mamet’s fun and games of verbal dexterity, wit and intrigue, but without sufficient fun or games to match Wilde’s comedies of manners.

It takes Clare Corbett’s loopy, loose tongued, lachrymose Maid, cast adrift in American service from her uneducated Scottish roots, to lift the production from immaculate proficiency. Corbett gave a remarkable performance last summer as an autistic child fearlessly facing up to death in the SJT’s Spoonface Steinberg and she is tremendous again, so gifted in timing and mannerisms and in nailing an accent to maximum comic effect. Further roles await her in this summer’s rep and Monks has a gem on his hands.

Monks’s direction savours bringing out the carefully-laid intrigues and the mischief-making in Mamet’s writing, but while Boston Marriage is enjoyable in a minor key, the playwright’s tone is never clear. There is the novelty of his feminine focus but beyond the sporadic fruity language, the play is a surprisingly straight, if heightened comedy, rather than a modern send-up of a bygone theatre age.

Boston Marriage, in The McCarthy, Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough, on various dates in the summer rep until June 30. Box office: 01723 370541