J B Priestley may have created the new theatre form of the “Time Play” in the 1930s, but When We Are Married is a Stuck In Time play in the hands of artistic director Ian Brown.

Unlike the Playhouse’s Priestley season in 2001, when the work of Bradford’s bard of the common people found a new context, Brown’s production is a museum piece, albeit a very pretty one on Colin Richmond’s stoical set, but too distant and metronomic to touch the heart.

From brass-band music to the plants in the sitting room of Alderman Helliwell’s house in Clecklewyke, everything is just right, and therefore too perfect, and so the drama is closer to lifeless than lively.

Priestley knew a thing or two about marriage – he married three times – and his West Riding farce from 1938 is built on the anguish of stagnant relationships: a touchstone across the ages, although now couples press the divorce button far more readily.

In 1938 they would stick together, like it or lump it, but Priestley throws a playful spanner in the works. What would happen if you discover you were not really married after all: the very fate of three prosperous, complacent, chapel-going Edwardian couples who have gathered on a September evening in 1908 to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the day they all took their vows, only to now discover their certificates were null and void.

Suddenly, honesty will have its say as the tectonic plates of marriage begin to crack, or more truthfully grind in the second half. Only in the drink-emboldened defiance of Les Dennis’s previously hen-pecked Herbert Soppitt does a comic spark ignite among the sniffy couples.

Below stairs, Priestley’s Yorkshire dialogue fares better among the rebellious servants, Eileen O’Brien’s bolshy charwoman Mrs Northrop and especially Jodie McNee’s young, fruity-mouthed Ruby Burtle.

Tom Georgeson’s drunken newspaper photographer, Henry Ormonroyd, is even more of an anarchic figure, bonding with the audience by bringing an element of knowing absurdity to his Falstaffian turn.

Sadly, they cannot stop When We Are Married from being a flat, enervating experience: as stagnant as the marriages in fact.

When We Are Married, West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds, until April 25. Box office: 0113 213 7700.