Saving the best for last, Talking Heads brings the West Yorkshire Playhouse’s Alan Bennett season to a close.

Staging three of the monologues that were written in 1988 for the BBC, the actors have a tough challenge competing with roles made famous by Bennett, Maggie Smith and Patricia Routledge.

It’s to the credit of the cast that they make the roles their own and to director James Brining too for selecting pieces that have recurring themes such as death’s shadow, isolation and fear that the characters will be confronted with unimaginable alternatives if their ordinary, stagnating lives are challenged.

Here the prospect of having coffee instead of a routine cup of tea is enough to throw Graham (Christopher Chilton) off balance in A Chip in the Sugar, while Irene (Vanessa Rosenthal) is outraged when social workers call her by her first name instead of Miss Ruddock in A Lady of Letters (“I haven’t been Irene since Mother died.)”

These small details — the importance of a name or Susan (Cate Hamer) polishing a candlestick with Brasso in Bed Among the Lentils — lend the pieces a sense of realism and nostalgia. They also offer a solid basis to these mini-tragedies, where a humorous one-liner can shift in the very next sentence into something much darker and lonelier.

Such shifts in tone are supported by the characters pottering around Barney George’s simple set design, with Graham folding large floral knickers on a bed and Susan nervously rolling an empty sherry glass between her fingers.

The closed set emphasises the way in which they’re trapped in situations largely of their own making, too scared to connect with life in any meaningful way.

This sense of loneliness stays with the audience long after the humour has subsided, even though the piece does end on a note of twisted happiness when circumstance finally sweeps Irene out of her comfort zone.

Runs until July 5. Box office: (0113) 213-770.