NICK Lane's first original play, the charity-industry cautionary tale of The Derby McQueen Affair, is the hands of director Tim Welton at York Theatre Royal.

Both are happy with the partnership.

"It's been very interesting to watch Tim in rehearsals, because he comes up with things I haven't thought of," says Nick, who directed productions of his own adaptations of Beauty And The Beast and The Hunchback Of Notre Dame.

"I'll think 'Why didn't I think of that?', and the answer is because I'm not Tim. Sometimes it's better to be dispassionate about your own work."

Tim says he is "very comfortable" working with Nick.

"We worked on the play for three days in February and that was our chance to see if we could hit it off, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Nick genuinely doesn't get in the way because he has worked as an actor with directors and knows how the dynamics work."

Tim previously directed Alan Bennett's Single Spies and Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting at the Theatre Royal. This time, he is working on a freshly-minted premiere. "I feel enormously empowered," he says. "The piece has a strong voice and my job is to take it down different routes in rehearsal to get to the final voice."

What is that voice? "It's definitely a comedy - Nick is at his funniest when he is at his darkest at the moment of great desperation - and one of the functions of comedy is to make you question things.

"So we've been experimenting with the play during the three weeks. It has a lot of straight-to-the-audience storytelling, which is Nick's background in theatre writing, and it also has that thing of being what Nick has called 'confessional'. By the end you understand why each person did what they did in the charity scam."

Tim praises Nick for his writing style.

"Nick writes dialogue incredibly well and incredibly fast. That comes partly from being an actor, so the characters are incredibly well formed with the minimum of writing, but then there are these pathways underneath, such as the male-female relationship going on in the play," he says. "It also helps that when Nick writes, he imagines who he is writing the dialogue for."

Analysing how the writer-director partnership is working, Nick says: "The pair of us are the reasonable twins in that we're very conscious of treading on each other's toes but, at the same time, we're not tentative with each other.

"It's fascinating to work in a different style to when I direct, with lots more room for improvisation and testing different routes. As I've told Tim, I will steal some of his ideas and this production will certainly influence my directing.

"It's about safe hands. Working with Tim, I don't need feel a need to take over. I may go to him in a rehearsal break and say 'This might work' and he will say 'I know, but we're experimenting', and then two days later it's better than it was in my head!"

Tim rejoins: "As a nation that likes creating plays, it's always good to have the chance to test things, yet more and more we're expected to say instantly what we're going to do or to look at solving problems. But what I like about this production is having the time to experiment. This is the better way to put on plays."

The Derby McQueen Affair, The Studio, York Theatre Royal, tonight until July 10. Box office: 01904 623568.

Why is The Derby McQueen Affair so titled?

"The honest answer is that I had a dream, which kind of gave me the basis for the play," says writer Nick Lane. "In the dream there was a person called Derby McQueen, and that was the day I wrote the story down.

"I told my dad and he said it was a brilliant name, and then when I told artistic director Damian Cruden, he rejected the original title of the play, Making A Difference, and said, 'That's a nothing title, you should go with Derby McQueen'."

Updated: 15:32 Thursday, June 17, 2004