YORKSHIRE playwright Mike Poulton, so skilful at adapting existing texts, has written versions of Henrik Ibsen's Ghosts no fewer than seven times.

"When I looked back at the first one, I blushed," he recalls. "I don't think you can ever write the same script twice because language changes and times change."

Sixteen years on from the Millennium Mystery Plays in York Minster, Mike has revisited his script for the Minster Mystery Plays 2016. "I was very happy with it last time, but as you watch and listen to the audience's reaction, you learn so much and make mental notes about how to change it," says the Bradford-born writer, who lives in Norfolk. "It's shorter than last time; I've cut out 20 minutes in the second half and it now has a great deal of pace to it."

Mike says he has been working constantly at revising his words. "A thing is never finished. If you think about it, when they were building the Minster as you see it now, immediately it was finished around the time the Mystery Plays started, it would start needing repairs, so it's a constant restoration job and so the Minster will never be 'finished'. It will always need work on it.

York Press:

Mike Poulton: "New script is stronger, cleaner and more accessible". Picture: Duncan Lomax

"So it's all about housekeeping, and in the same way you do that with the text. The new script is stronger, cleaner and more accessible, I hope. The audiences will certainly tell us."

We all change through the passing years and 16 years is a considerable chunk of a life. "You never stop learning and I hope I never stop improving as a writer," says Mike, whose new play Kenny Morgan, the story of playwright Terence Rattigan's love life and the true origins of his play The Deep Blue Sea, has just opened to five-star and four-star reviews at the Arcola Theatre in Hackney, London.

"I've been working there with seven actors and director Lucy Bailey in a theatre that seats 200, which is roughly the size of the cast for the Mystery Plays, so as a writer you can go from the small scale to the epic scale of the Minster stage where it feels like the size of a football pitch."

What Mike has learnt is that the more time you spend with your audiences and the more time you spend writing, you develop your tricks of the trade. "I reckon an adaptation of a play will last four or five years before it needs an overhaul and has to go into the body-shop for a complete refit," he says.

"Nothing is set in stone, so when you have different writers working on the same original script, you end up with as many different plays as there are writers. For example, no two Uncle Vanyas are ever the same."

Working on the York Mystery Plays, with their near 700-year history, brings further challenges. "These are community plays that came out of the people of York and York feels protective about them, so what you're doing as a writer is presenting them back to the people of York with great attention to them," says Mike.

"You are acting as the arbiter of the language of the people of York, and it's clear that the plays have passed through different hands, but they're all playwrights, not theological writers. It's apparent that there are people who have worked with the players over centuries developing the plays.

"So I am simply continuing that process that has grown and developed through the centuries, as the Minster building has. We've brought the plays into the Minster, so we have two elements to the language: the language of the plays as they're written and the language you don't hear until we perform the plays.

"Being a Yorkshireman helps me because you can identify the rhythms of the Yorkshire dialect. The sounds haven't changed and a lot of the vocabulary of the past is not dead. You're bringing to life language that was vibrant in its day and making it vibrant again. We have the 200 people of York in the cast giving something back to the other people of York and I'm just a cog in that wheel."

The York Minster Mystery Plays run until June 30. Box office: 01904 623568 or at yorktheatreroyal.co.uk