FETED by London's Royal Court, and brought home to God's Own by Hull Truck Theatre, Hull-born playwright Richard Bean is the most insightful Yorkshire playwright of the moment.

A cast requirement of 14 meant that no one would commission The English Game but, thankfully, Headlong Theatre and director Sean Holmes have taken on Bean's state-of-the-nation report wrapped inside a cricket comedy. Alas its innings on Yorkshire soil runs to only four days, and today is close of play.

Bean played weekend club cricket - the stuff of Richard Harris's Outside Edge and Alan Ayckbourn's Time And Time Again - for 30 years before knackered knees forced his retirement. The game he loves is changing and so is the country that invented it, as symbolised by the dog muck on the boundary edge.

On the hottest of August Sundays, the disparate players of the Nightwatchmen amateur team from the London fringes gather once more. Each welcomes his day away from the domestic or work grind, be it captain Sean (Tim Bell), trapped in marital torment, gay Hindu Nick (Rudi Dharmalingam), black British Council worker Olly (Marcus Onilude), rock star wag Thiz (Sean Murray) or thespian Clive (John Lightbody), a darling wit with exquisite gifts of vocabulary.

Played out on the boundary before the game, between innings over sandwiches and during the Nightwatchmen's increasingly tense run chase, The English Game is no hymn of regret, more a fair-minded study of "the ideological faultlines in our cultural society", an analysis of how attitudes to Jihad and Islam, and not the old fissures of class or race, are dividing us.

The fly in the ointment is the team's late deputy, racist Telecom drone Reg (Fred Ridgeway), whose ultimate ostracising by one and all is Bean's most significant statement, before a contemplative coda on mortality.

Bean's writing, fuelled by his past as an occupational psychologist and stand-up, is wiry and witty, passionate and compassionate, and when the normally implacable club stalwart Willl (Robert East) rails against English self-hatred, he nails our prevailing ailment.

  • The English Game, Headlong Theatre, West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds. Box office: 0113 213 7700.