INTRODUCING... playwright Nick Lane's sardonic and surreal new comedy, My Favourite Summer.

* It is 1995, and 23-year-old Dave is in love with Sarah. He's been obsessed with her through his teenage years and now they are renting a house together as "mates".

* Sarah is off to New York to study for a PhD. Dave, an out-of-work actor, doesn't want her to go. He desperately needs the pennies to treat her to a romantic break abroad. So he spends a month working alongside nutcase Melvin at a scaffolding firm in the summer job from hell.

* Charles Hutchinson takes a trip down memory Lane with the writer-director.

Is My Favourite Summer autobiographical, Nick?

"Yes, very much so. What I've tried to do is truncate three stories that were pertinent to my twenties' life, which were all running concurrently but didn't all resolve themselves in one summer - though there were all going on in that same summer.

"To create a drama out of it, I've changed things around, but everything in it did happen to me; specifically working for a scaffolding firm and having a pathetic crush on a girl for ten years."

How did you end working for a scaffolding firm?

"This man used to drink with my father in the pub and he knew I was skint, and so he said, 'Would your lad like to do some work this summer?', as they needed someone to service scaffold fittings. I stayed for four and a half weeks, working in this scaffolding warehouse somewhere in North Lincolnshire, cleaning the hinges and brackets that hold building sites together."

Important job, surely?

"Important job, yes, but completely mind-numbing. Putting that sperm suit on in the morning; completely humiliating; like Woody Allen in Everything You Wanted To Know about Sex, but without the humour? or the harmonica.

"Each day you'd use an adjustable spanner to get the brackets off, then rub each bracket with a wire brush and clean it with WD40, for eight hours a day in an aircraft hangar, where this guy Bob would drive me at breakneck speed, so I'd keep my eyes shut all journey. For him, it seemed to be like driving out of the bat cave."

What led you to your skint state?

"I'd decided against going to university, as I was already working for Hull Truck and getting some TV work, and as John Hull Truck artistic director John Godber had been my mentor and teacher, and I was learning from him, I kept deferring university for three years. But then as soon as I made up my mind, the theatre work dried up, so I had to do that summer job."

What can you reveal about your ten-year crush?

"That did get resolved, but two years later. I went to school with her - at Thorne, which is near Doncaster - and she was the first person to treat me anything like a human being. She was smart and she was funny, and I attached all those things to her, but she just saw me as a friend.

"You start writing poems and doing all the usual crush things, and she sort of humiliated me into revealing all my feelings, which I did."

What happened?

"She's now married with kids and living in Birmingham, but when we see each other we're fine."

So, that explains the characters of Dave and Sarah in the play, but who is "nutcase Melvin"?

"For the first two weeks at the scaffolding warehouse, I was submitted to all these homosexual jibes as I'd revealed that I was an actor. I showed Melvin a picture of the girl, but they got it out of me that she wasn't my girlfriend, and he then gave me tips on how to make her my girlfriend. It was a summer of absolute humiliation."

What did he suggest?

"His advice was to flash a girl your man face? I've no idea what that is. This guy was self-aware enough to know he was stupid, but he wasn't embarrassed in any situation.

He had a certain kind of confidence that I could never achieve at that age, so it was a clash of cultures. He once asked me to go round town with him, but I'd rather have pushed hot pins into my face - though in the play they do have a night on the town."

Give an example of how you were chalk and cheese, please.

"Cleaning up brackets with Radio 1 blaring out in the warehouse, we ended up swapping stories at lunchtimes, me telling theatre stories, him telling stories of friends being brutalised, and like Robert Duvall in Apocalypse Now, he always had this ability to survive."

You survived too to tell the tale in a play that "takes the lid off sexuality and relationships", according to the press blurb.

"The play is more about finding about who you are. In my experience, it's not necessarily the people you like who teach you most, but those you don't. Melvin had a way of thinking about the world that crystallised my thoughts: not as polar opposites but as life lessons.

It's about seeing the other side of life."

My Favourite Summer, Hull Truck Theatre, Hull, January 25 to February 17, then on tour to 36 venues from February 21 to April 21. Hull box office: 01482 323638.