BEST known as Cilla Battersby in Coronation Street, actress Wendi Peters is helping focus attention on one of the North’s great lost cultural gems.

The Game by Harold Brighouse, whose best known play Hobson’s Choice is an acknowledged classic, has not been performed for nearly 100 years but is enjoying a revival by Northern Broadsides and opens a five-night run at Salisbury Playhouse on Tuesday.

It’s a spirited urban comedy set during the halcyon days of professional football, when players were genuinely working-class heroes, although it also highlights some surprising similarities with the beautiful game as it is today.

“I’d never heard of this play,” says Wendi. “It’s set in 1913 and it was written then, but it’s so relevant to today – not just the main theme, which obviously is football, but the class system. We like to think there is no class system nowadays but there is.

“A rich girl marrying a poor boy, his mother not wanting him to get into that situation, and her father not wanting her to marry him: it’s just a really good meaty play. I was so surprised it hadn’t been done for that amount of time.”

Wendi plays Mrs Metherell, the mother of star footballer Jack.

“She is very, very strong and she obviously adores this boy, she’s mollycoddled him, looked after him on his own from being a young child. She doesn’t want him marrying some woman who doesn’t know how to clean the flags outside the front door properly.”

Are there parallels between Mrs Metherell and the character you played in Coronation Street, Cilla Battersby-Brown?

“Cilla’s a mother – but the character I’m playing in The Game loves her son dearly. Cilla did love Chesney but in a very superficial way – she never showed it.

“She was one of those people who never thought about anything before she spoke, she just came straight out with it. She was bright, but in a very conniving way – if there was a scheme going, she’d work it out. So there aren’t big similarities, apart from them both being strong northern women.”

Do those legendary northern matriarchs still exist?

“I think they probably do, but on a much subtler level. Nowadays people are much more independent, women particularly, so there isn’t as much of that staying at home with your parents. There are still those mums who sons will marry someone who will never be good enough for them.”