TWENTY years ago, John Godber left his job as head of drama at Minsthorpe High School to become a full-time playwright and theatre director. That year, he wrote his first Hull Truck hit, the Rugby League-meets-Rocky comedy Up'n'Under (which will be revived in Hull in July).

Forty-five plays later, he is still making the journey from "plays that are just funny, to plays that are funny only until you stop laughing", of which Fly Me To The Moon is the latest example.

The Hull Truck heavy hitters - Sarah Parks, Christine Cox, James Hornsby and Adrian Hood, in his first Hull show for four years - have come out to play in Godber's "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest in an aeroplane".

Inspiration came, as it so often does with Godber, from his own experiences. With Up'n'Under, he had played sevens rugby in the Rugby League hotbed of Hull; with Fly Me To The Moon, his wife had booked him on a course to conquer his fear of flying. "I thought thanks for that, but then I discovered I was the least frightened of the 300 people on the plane," he recalls.

So, it was all about confidence and belief in yourself and overcoming obstacles, just as it had been in Up'n'Under and plenty more Godber plays since then. Godber says he has "gone full circle, back to common experience, to highlight ordinary behaviour to see what makes us tick".

For Fly Me To The Moon, he has assembled a ragbag of quirky, brash stereotypes to undergo some kind of group therapy in a stage play, this time addressing the common ground of a phobia of flying, although each participant on the Fly With Confidence day has a deeper-seated, self-constricting fear.

Gathered on a rainy day in the departure lounge of a regional airport are psychotic lorry driver Dougie (the excellent Hood); nave, nymphomaniac Kelly (Kiki Kendrick); asthmatic, hyper, lonely widow Stella (Gilly Tompkins) and the rather too similar Madge (Cox).

What marks this out as a latterday Godber play is the central couple whose relationship is in terminal decline. Like Godber's wife, Anne (Parks) has booked husband Dave (Hornsby) on the course, and they are in for a bumpy ride emotionally as well as physically. Indeed, the play's coda, a sudden battle of recrimination, is perhaps the most vicious dialogue of Godber's career.

That is where his writing should go. Before that, too much of the flat-paced Fly Me To The Moon never takes off, stuck like Greek tragedies in describing what happened in the air, rather than showing it.

Updated: 09:51 Friday, March 19, 2004