THE pie and the pint will be available from 6pm before the play starts at 7pm in an improvised theatre space by the bar with seating on all four sides.

The two actors in Hobbit ears and furry feet are having a meal too, a kind of last supper as it turns out, in Amy Rosenthal’s newly commissioned 50-minute piece, Polar Bears.

This is the first in the 2015 A Play, A Pie & A Pint season that will continue with a new work by New York feminist playwright Eve Ensler from May 26 to 30.

Rosenthal, daughter of Hull actress Maureen Lipman and playwright Jack Rosenthal, is making her Playhouse debut with a warm and witty exploration of young love, as she dissects a relationship on the cusp of change.

In a frosty woodland clearing on the outskirts of Leeds, games enthusiast (David Leopold) and his girlfriend (fellow Playhouse Graduate scheme actor Verity Kirk, from Harrogate) are clinging fast to the rules of their fantasy world – hence The Hobbit attire and Lemnas bread – as their real one unravels.

There are distant shades of Billy Liar’s Billy Fisher in the boy, a fantasist who can never quite face the reality of a move from the family nest and cosy job at Fantasia World to a new beginning in London with his girlfriend of three years. She has settled there already but keeps talking of someone else, a sure sign of drifting apart.

They dance around the subject, sticking to their Hobbit habit of coded speech as Sam Gamgee and Mr Frodo, but he breaks out from talking Tolkien to tell stories of eggs with painted faces; she mentions the other chap again; and then comes the moment.

The one that comes with a thudding full stop. The one from which there is no return.

We have all been there, said that, and Rosenthal nails the doomsday denouement scenario with humour, tenderness and a knowing familiarity, while the young cast members tug at our heart strings in their tightening discomfort zone.

A Play, A Pie & A Pint : Polar Bears, West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds, tonight at 7pm. Box office: 0113 213 7700 or wyp.org.uk