Plays and movies with a geographical name as a title may or may not stimulate curiosity.

They are more of them than you may think: Casablanca, Copenhagen, Gallipoli, Berlin: Sym-phony of a Great City, Shanghai Express, Oklahoma! Tobruk, Chicago, Raid on Entebbe, LA Confidential, Paris, Texas.

The accumulation of cultural reference means that some are more immediately arresting than others - Casablanca, Gallipoli, Raid on Entebbe, for example.

Will Louise Page's play Salonika join them? In a word it's about the triumph of hope and love over experience.

Enid, 64, takes her 84-year-old mother Charlotte to Greece, partly to get away from someone and partly to visit the grave of her father, killed in World War One.

Enid hopes to persuade Charlotte from marrying 75-year-old Leonard, who hitch-hikes across Europe to find the woman of his dreams.

But while this is going on, Enid herself falls for a 25-year-old naked Englishman on the beach who tends the cemetery where her father's grave is.

Any resemblance to Shirley Valentine is purely coincidental.

"It's very different from that. It's a funny play, not tragic. These are people who have lived their ordinary lives and suddenly they are in extraordinary circumstances. It's a very positive piece, actually," Louise said when we met at West Yorkshire Playhouse.

"It's a play about compassion, humanity and love, with older people falling in love. I have always felt that older people get a raw deal from society.

"At the time I wrote it, before British Rail was privatised, there was this offer: you could go to Edinburgh by rail for £1. You'd see all these older people going to Edinburgh, perhaps for the first time. I thought that was fantastic.

"Just before I wrote Salonika I had been to Iceland. I met a women in her late 70s. Her mother has just died. This woman was taking herself round the world and was up for anything. I just thought that was fantastic."

Twenty years have passed since Salonika's last staging in the UK in 1987. It first appeared at London's Royal Court Upstairs five years earlier and won the George Devine Award. A quarter of a century on, what does the revival of her play mean to her?

"The cult of youth has become more pertinent than it was 25 years ago. If I was writing a similar play now, I would be interested in the demonisation of youth and the fear of them. The 25-year-old on the beach is not a wastrel: he is the most humane and wisest character in the play," she added.

The cast of five includes Josephine Tewson as Charlotte. She was the long-suffering, anxious Elizabeth in the BBC1 television comedy Keeping up Appearances.

The part of her daughter Enid is played by former Royal Shakespeare Company actress Lyn Farleigh - Sonia in Midsomer Murders and Jean Parks in Doctors.

Paul Fox, the young man on the beach, is better known for his role in Coronation Street as Mark Redman.

Nikolai Foster directs. He also directed Bollywood Jane at the Playhouse.

Louise has eight plays to her name and for ten years she wrote scripts for The Archers on BBC Radio 4.

She said: "It was a fantastic discipline because you had to write fast. You had to do a week's worth of scripts - five 15-minute episodes - in a month. I liked writing about the Grundy family because they could be comic but had a very emotional underbelly.

"All your story-lines are supplied and seemingly silly things like what time it is light and dark in the episode you're writing. If you are doing a medical storyline you are given all the notes about what you are covering.

"I did ten years and that was enough. I was doing a lot of other things as well; it was all just getting very squeezed."

  • Salonika runs at West Yorkshire Playhouse from January 18 to February 16, starting at 7.45pm. There are seven matinees at 2pm and 2.30pm. For more details and tickets the box office number is (0113) 2137700.