WELL known Beans? There have been Baked Beans and Mr Bean, but Richard Bean is not a household name even in his home city of Hull.

All that could change with Hull Truck's regional premiere of Under The Whaleback, his play set among the nets and trawlers of Hull's fishing industry, with a cast led by the Barrass brothers from Hull, David and York Theatre Royal pantomime favourite Martin.

Bean came to playwriting late, in his mid- thirties, after a few years as a journeyman stand-up comic, subsequently writing for the Royal Court and the National Theatre, where he served as writer-in-residence in 2001.

Hull Truck Theatre has picked up on Under The Whaleback, a pungent and poignant work so far reserved for "the good ladies of Sloane Square" last year. Now the play has found its natural home. Drawing upon the characteristic of Hull people having a "strange mixture of comedy and tragedy about them", Bean depicts three trawling generations and four decades in a humorous yet harrowing drama that favours an epic three-act structure.

The setting is the crew's living quarters of a trawler - a different trawler for each act, with period detail updated by designer Richard Foxton - and it is in this elemental place that trawler man Darrell undergoes his voyage of self-discovery.

In Act One, in 1965, Darrell is a 17-year-old snacker (played by Nick Figgis), an apprentice newly in the charge of Cassidy (David Barrass), a heavy-drinking legend of the docks and The Criterion pub. Superbly portrayed by Barrass, Cassidy is a fictional creation but wholly truthful to the droll yet dour profile that Bean believes better fits the people of Hull than Liverpool.

In Act Two, Darrell is 24, aboard the storm-blasted James Joyce trawler in 1972, in the smoking, card-playing company of shell-shocked Norman (Paul Popplewell), stalwart, joshing Bill (Martin Barrass) and steady Rock (Paul Kynman). Here the heroic yet ordinary nature of Hull's trawler men is most strongly depicted.

By Act Three, Darrell (now played by David Barrass) is running a trawler museum in 2002, 30 years on from being the sole survivor as the James Joyce went down. He is visited by Pat (Popplewell), the black-market scally with retribution on his mind for the loss of the trawling father he never met. Violence is added to the salty language that has peppered the play, and Bean's past in psychology comes to the surface as Under The Whaleback takes a Pinter-esque turn for the darker.

Gareth Tudor Price's riveting, earthy production belatedly introduces Bean's work to his Yorkshire roots. The playwright says he has plenty more Hull plays in his repertoire; more productions surely will follow.

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Updated: 09:50 Tuesday, March 02, 2004