TWO Bradford actors are appearing in a stage revival of a classic penned by the city’s literary great JB Priestley.

John Gully is taking on the role of the Reverend Clement Mercer in the much loved and rarely toured classic comedy When We Are Married.

Fellow thespian Kat Rose-Martin, from Bierley, is playing the maid, Ruby Birtle.

Set in Edwardian England in the fictitious West Riding town of Cleckleywyke, believed to be a composite of Cleckheaton, Heckmondwike and Keighley, the play centres around three couples - the Helliwells, the Parkers and the Soppitts.

All are upstanding, highly respected pillars of their community - until they all discover an alarming fact about their matrimonial status.

Married on the same day, in the same chapel, they gather to celebrate their 25th wedding anniversary. The celebrations are short lived when they discover that the vicar wasn’t licensed and not one of the couples is actually not married. In fact, to their horror, they have been living in sin for a quarter of a century.

The initial horrified social embarrassment soon turns to something entirely different as individuals ponder the idea of being free from the shackles of marriage.

With the arrival on the doorstep of an old flame of one of the husbands, the local press due to arrive, a blackmailing cook, a drunken photographer and the chapel organist secretly ‘carrying on’ with the Helliwell’s niece, can the three couples keep a lid on their embarrassing secret or will it leak out, shattering their standing within the community?

Gully is well known for roles in Emmerdale, where he played DC Porter, Coronation Street, where he took the role of DS Palmer, and for his part as the Duke of Norfolk in Elizabeth, screened on Channel Four.

Rose-Martin attended Buttershaw Business and Enterprise College and Dixons City Academy before joining Kaleidoscope Youth Theatre at Bingley Little Theatre. She taught at Stagecoach in Bradford and has acted and directed for Sneaky Experience in Leeds.

He also appears as Harry the landlord in the new film Dusty and Me, a feel-good, heart-warming film set in Yorkshire in 1977, about an adolescent boy’s summer after leaving school.

The play is directed by Barrie Rutter, designed by Jessica Worrall, and with lighting by Tim Skelly

When We Are Married will tour nationally from September 9 to December 10 2016, with venues including the Quarry Theatre at West Yorkshire Playhouse.

The play brings together a wealth of West Yorkshire talent: Leeds-born Kate Anthony, actress Lisa Howard, who lives in Leeds and Leeds-born actor Steve Huison, who played Eddie Windass in Coronation Street from 2008 to 20011 and has also starred in dramas including Casualty, Heartbeat and Scott & Bailey.

Actress Sue Devaney, known for her roles in Coronation Street, Jonny Briggs, Casualty and Dinnerladies.

Northern Broadsides and York Theatre Royal worked together previously on Blake Morrison’s adaptation of Goldoni’s Italian farce The Man with Two Gaffers in 2006 in York.

a*When We Are Married is at West Yorkshire Playhouse between Tuesday October 18 and Saturday October 22. For tickets: W: wyp.org.uk/events/when-we-are-married; T: 013 213 7700.