RICHARD Bean is the Hull playwright with Royal Court and National Theatre commissions, an anarchic play to kick-start Hull's year as UK City of Culture 2017 (The Hypocrite) and a smash hit everywhere with the fierce, frenetic farce One Man, Two Guvnors.

By comparison with those often darkly humorous works on a grand scale, Kiss Me is not so much a Bean feast as a Bean hors d'oeuvre, an intriguing, sensitive and intimate chamber piece that began life at the Hampstead Theatre last year and is now being staged outside London for the first time.

That's a considerable coup for Beverley's East Riding Theatre, where Bean happens to be an ambassador, and if you are yet to set foot in this enterprising addition to Yorkshire's theatre map, this two-hander would be a good start.

Bean's "forbidden love story" is set in the late-1920s in a Britain still in the shadow of the Great War that left Stephanie (Bettine Mackenzie) a widow, with not much chance of finding a husband. She wants a baby, a need driving her to desperate measures, and Dennis (Edward Cole) is the man with the golden shot – the unusual, doctor-brokered profession of making widows pregnant – who can assist her.

And so these two strangers meet in London. No kissing is the rule; only one meeting; in, out, job done...or not. What happens, however, if they break those boundaries? What might happen next? Bean keeps serving up the surprises, adding, rather than taking away, layers of mystery, always one step ahead, before pulling off his coup de grace.

There is humour at play and a graveness too, with more tenderness than previously aired in Bean works, but Bean always has a sting in his tales, and a feminist streak on this occasion. Matt Aston's direction pulls the strings as skilfully as a puppeteer, taking the audience this way and that; his cast of Lenkiewicz's progressive Stephanie and Cole's clinical chancer Dennis adding to the intrigue with each new shock wave, as they move been closeness and distance in ever-changing patterns.

Richard Bean's Kiss Me, East Riding Theatre, Beverley, until October 28. Box office: 01482 874050 or eastridingtheatre.co.uk