This is not drawing room Noel Coward with his familiar sardonic world weary and witty characters.

This Happy Breed is Coward’s celebration of solid Englishness, ordinary people who lived through extraordinary times.

It’s a dramatised piece of English social history covering the 20 years between the wars as seen through events in the Gibbons family; their hopes, fears, loves and tragedies.

The dialogue sounds like an old black and white film, stilted and formal, and moral attitudes were equally rigid. Or rather the Gibbons represent a generation hanging on to its old values in a rapidly changing world.

Queenie (Sally Tatum), the younger Gibbons daughter, runs off with a married man and her mother won’t have her name mentioned in the house.

French stamps on an envelope send grandmother (Marjorie Yates), who lives with the family, into a fever of xenophobia.

Director Stephen Unwin has recreated the period admirably with the help of Simon Higlett’s set and Mark Bouman’s costumes especially.

Dean Lennox Kelly and Rebecca Johnson are Frank and Ethel Gibbons who we first meet moving into their new rented house a few weeks after Frank’s demob from the First World War.

As the play progresses they age convincingly. We meet their children when they are young adults, together with son Reg Gibbons’ friend Sam, who embraces Communist theories.

Jayne McKenna as Frank’s hypochondriac sister Sylvia, infuriates and exasperates the family, first with her hypochondria and again when she is drawn into the Christian Science church and swings completely the other way, despising illness and doctors alike.

It’s a beautifully crafted slice of English life.