FIELDS Of Gold was a play waiting to happen for Alex Jones.

"I live in Worcestershire, where I know lots of farmers and I've worked on farms and I still do now and then, in between acting and writing," he says. "At the moment I'm doing some building work to get by."

Such experiences have prompted his latest play, a tale of milk quotas, crop circles, Alzheimer's disease, a son who speaks to aliens and a daughter with a plan to transform the Handley family farm into an organic hippie joint. Ben Handley can bear it no more: his mother is sleeping in a JCB bucket; wife Mags is struggling to hold family and farm together; and foot and mouth disease is at the doorstep.

"I used to be a volunteer for The Samaritans, and I know that the pressure is really on for farmers in a way that it has never been before," says Alex. "There's a particular friend of mine who had a dairy herd of 50 cows and he gave it up to become a builder.

"Farming is our last great industry and we're sitting around watching it disappear. Once that productive land has gone, it's gone forever."

Thus far, Fields Of Gold sounds like it will be Fields Of Gloom, but not so. "When you're telling any story, if it's unremitting misery, the audience is going to switch off, but within any desperate situation, people find humour," Alex says.

"My mum died of cancer a few years ago and she was still finding humour in things. It's just human nature, a way of coping."

The play is more a family drama than a farming story. "A play just about farming and nothing else would not be interesting. This is a story about a family, and ultimately families are changing and people are learning to live differently and accept different values," he says.

As for the play's title, Fields Of Gold: "Obviously it comes from the Sting song, though I was thinking more of the Eva Cassidy version. Half the play is set in a cornfield, but the field is disappearing and so they can't make gold out of it."

Fields Of Gold, Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough, running from this week until November 20.

Updated: 15:33 Thursday, October 28, 2004