YORK has known Paul Osborne, the actor, the comedy double act, the theatre director and the sustainable transport charity worker.

Now he is adding playwriting to his bow with the premiere of his debut play, The Bluest Blue, which began life as a short scene at a radio-writing course last summer and then became a 15-minute script for Script Factor evening of new writing at York Theatre Royal.

“It might have stopped there but for Manchester’s 24:7 Theatre Festival, which gave me a deadline to work to,” says Ossie, as he is known. “I remember posting the script on a snowy day in January. It felt good to have written a full play. It felt even better when I got invited to the festival.”

Directed by Paul Stonehouse, the 50-minute play completes its run in Manchester this weekend before its York premiere at 41 Monkgate from Thursday.

“All the plays at the festival are an hour long or less; if they’re not, someone just turns off the lights,” says Ossie.

“The had a panel of readers who worked in theatre and TV in Manchester who chose ten plays to be produced and four more to be given rehearsed readings – and mine was the only one from Yorkshire.

“What’s been great is that they put the onus on the writer to produce the play as well, and that makes you learn about whether your writing can work in a theatrical sense; whether it’s a play you can afford to put on; whether it’s a play that can attract actors to it.”

Ossie decided not to act in the play or direct it.

“Paul Stonehouse [a regular actor on the York stage] suggested he could direct it, so he’s directing his first play, and Hannah Dee, who is a writer, is acting in it,” he says.

“Hannah gave me advice when I was writing it, and together with Paul’s involvement, it’s felt like a really collaborative effort without egos.”

His play began with two characters, a York street cleaner and a Barnsley straggler, out on a hen night in York dressed as a traffic warden with fairy wings. “But then I found I wanted to chuck a hapless character into the middle,” says Ossie, who duly created a bookish young art student.

“I guess I have elements of the third character in me, and his situation reminded me of when I played Guy in Alan Ayckbourn’s A Chorus Of Disapproval, where all these events happen around him and that eventually forces him to look at his own life.”

Packed into 50 minutes is Ossie’s dissection of the role of the public sector (street cleaning and traffic wardens); sexual discovery; and what it means to live in York and Barnsley, as the play plays out the same encounters in the two Yorkshire strongholds.

“We behave differently in different territories: people behave one way on their own turf and set their manner and conversation up differently when they’re on different turf,” suggests Ossie.

• Old Bomb Theatre Company presents The Bluest Blue at 41 Monkgate Theatre, York, on August 5 at 9pm, August 6, 8pm, and August 7, 6pm and 8pm; box office, 01904 623568 or yorktheatreroyal.co.uk

• The play completes its run at Manchester’s 24:7 Theatre Festival with performances at New Century House, Manchester, tomorrow at 6pm and Sunday, 3.30pm.