SKIPTON playwright, poet and novelist Blake Morrison join forces with Northern Broadsides once more for the world premiere of For Love Or Money, 21 years after their first collaboration, The Cracked Pot.

The Halifax company's tour is playing the Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough, this week and will return to North Yorkshire from November 28 to December 2 for a run at York Theatre Royal as founder and artistic director Barrie Rutter directs a Broadsides touring show for the last time before standing down next April.

Morrison’s new adaptation of Alain-Rene Lesage’s savage 18th century comedy Turcaret is set in a small town in Yorkshire, where a beautiful widow is being wooed by two suitors. Fresh from the City and with endless money at his disposal, the older one showers her with gifts, which the younger one, a handsome, impecunious, inveterate gambler) wants to put to better use.

Money, however, is a slippery commodity and all is not as it seems. Throw in a bailiff, a drunkard, a vamp, a second-hand clothes dealer and two upwardly mobile servants, and the complications multiply.

Morrison has translated and adapted multiple works for Broadsides, the most recent being We Are Three Sisters in 2011. "It’s 21 years now since my first collaboration with Barrie Rutter, The Cracked Pot, an adaptation of a Kleist play in which, as well as directing, he took the leading role," he says. "By my count there have been seven more collaborations since, with adaptations of plays written in German, Italian, Russian and Ancient Greek – plus one, in Geordie, that required only minor adjustments for it to be 'Yorkshire-fied'.

"That’s been the pattern: wherever and whenever the original play is set, I try to render it in a language that’s true to Rutter’s allegiance to northern speech. Instead of RP, it becomes NBI – Northern Broadsides Idiom."

As he mentioned above, Morrison has adapted German, Italian, Russian, Ancient Greek and now French plays. "Most of which I don't speak," he says. "French, of all those languages, is the only one I have some familiarity with, though I did study German at A-level. What I try to do is gather existing translations, and for this latest one, there were two, one recent, one much older.

"My priority is to make the play work in English and indeed in Yorkshire and northern speech. The 'Northern Broadsides Idiom' is direct. it's vibrant, it's energetic; not formal speech; no received pronunciation. It has a smack of conviction about it and of the place where they live."

Northern Broadsides presents For Love Or Money at Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough, until Saturday; York Theatre Royal, November 28 to December 2, 7.30pm, 2pm Thursday and 2.30m Saturday matinees. Box office: Scarborough, 01723 370541 or at sjt.uk.com; York, 01904 623568 or yorktheatreroyal.co.uk