THIS play has undergone many changes in its gestation and it will need to go through more.

The story of cellist Beatrice Harrison, the Jacqueline Du Pre of the 1920s, had already been the stuff of an autobiography edited by writer Patricia Cleveland Peck. Patricia went on to write a radio play of the "lady of the nightingales", whose cello playing was accompanied by the most beauteous of Surrey-garden birdsong in 12 annual outside broadcasts on the BBC.

In a joint project between Patricia and actress Brigit Forsyth, a stage version in the form of a two-hander with Miss Harrison and her psychiatrist fell by the wayside at the Leicester Haymarket, but the play found its way to both York Theatre Royal artistic director Damian Cruden and Heslington voice coach and theatre director Susan Stern.

The play was to be transformed into a four-hander, weaved around the relationship of the four Harrison sisters. It is this re-worked version that forms Stern's concerto-style stage premiere in York, in which the Harrison quartet of Beatrice (Forsyth), May (Frances Jeater), Margaret (Alwyne Taylor) and Monica (Tamara Ustinov) can be added to the Mitfords and Brontes as British sisters of mystery and fascination.

To say the focus falls solely upon the internecine frictions of the sisters would be misleading: the play also dips into the waters of Beatrice's relationship with fame, her fading relationship with her hairbrush and the outside world in later years and, above all, her umbilical relationship with the cello that she called Peter. This was the one male partner in her life - she never married - and it was interesting to talk afterwards to a young cellist, from the University of York, who had always considered her instrument to be feminine in their 13-year relationship.

The play opens with a back-screen projection in black and white of cello Peter in repose against Beatrice's chair - in the only moment of rest - in the upstairs room she is so reluctant to leave. Around the screen is an old gilt frame, and there is a door too, symbols in Siobhan Ferrie's stage design for the memory-play construction of Cleveland Peck's drama. Musical director Christopher Madin's score adds empathetic commentary as the sisters, led by the matronly May, struggle with what to do with Beatrice and her restless cello playing in her dotage.

Her life of strict routine, her rise to fame and her ageing all intermingle, with the sisters playing all the other characters to emphasise the distaff dominance. This abstract play finishes suddenly, Brigit Forsyth's cello playing at its most plaintive, with the closing chapters of the Harrison story left unopened. Gone after only an hour, this wild bird of a musical poem had been tamed too soon.

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Updated: 11:10 Wednesday, May 19, 2004