THE men in black moods, the fierce foursome with something of the nightlife about them, are back, playing the lads on the pull, the lasses on the lookout and assorted nocturnal creatures on the neon prowl in John Godber’s nightclub comedy Bouncers.

Godber directs his award-winning play once more as the final curtain falls on Spring Street and a new dawn awaits Hull Truck and its artistic director. Stuck in traffic in Monday’s rush hour, he had time on his handset for a phone interview with Charles Hutchinson.

What inspired you to write Bouncers in 1977?

“I suppose, seriously, years of unsuccessful disco-going in and around Pontefract and Wakefield.”

Didn’t you ever pull?

“No, I didn’t pull. The only thing I pulled was a slap in the mouth.”

In what circumstances did you write Bouncers?

“I don’t know if you’re aware of this idiosyncrasy, but I actually wrote it on my sister’s Petite typewriter at my mother’s house.

“I wrote it very quickly, and my feet would be going as quickly as my fingers, and when my mother was doing the ironing downstairs, she’d bang on the ceiling to tell me I was coming through the floor.”

Thirty-two years later, Bouncers is as popular as ever. Why?

“I think the reason it’s so successful is that form and content are absolutely hand in hand. There’s an honesty to it; it may be all about theatrical illusion – these four actors saying they’re playing four bouncers playing other characters – but there’s no hiding from it and it’s absolutely transparent.”

Is Bouncers a weight around your shoulders each time you write a new play?

“No, you have to be in the moment when you’re writing, and now I’m working on the new play for the new theatre.”

You have selected the same cast for the final Bouncers at Spring Street as you did for the 30th anniversary production: Jack Brady, Matthew Booth, Marc Bolton and James Hornsby as Lucky Eric, the king of the monologue in the monkey suit. Explain your choice.

“They were as good as it gets. Sometimes you should almost forget about the comedy and concentrate on the dark bits, as they did. So they were given first refusal.

“There have been casts as good as them but none have been better. I like them, and they did a 20-week tour last time – they were knackered at the end but they were match fit.”

If you could choose your dream-team foursome for Bouncers, who would be in the line-up?

“I’d have Sean Connery in there… because he’d bring his own suit… and I think I’d have Steven Berkoff somewhere in there, and maybe Arnold Schwarzenegger as Judd [the nutty, uppity one].

“Connery has to be Lucky Eric… and I can’t think of a fourth one.”

How about casting yourself John, as the director’s prerogative?!

“I did it in 2001, and halfway through the show I thought, ‘Who the hell has written this?’, as I was absolutely knackered.

“Me and Andy Dunn [York actor Andrew Dunn] did it in London, and I remember we didn’t bother with going to the dressing rooms after the matinee as they were four flights up the stairs and we just stayed on the stage. You’re so tired, you need a parachute to lift you up.”

Do you have any tips on how you should play a bouncer in Bouncers?

“The interesting thing about Bouncers is that you should never play ‘tough’ because the audience can smell you’re not. It’s like playing ‘funny’; play it for funny and you won’t be. Sometimes in Bouncers, that quiet psychosis can work. Also, this cast have 32 years of heritage behind them and they know they’re doing it at Spring Street for the last time; there’s nothing to prove.”

Will this production differ from the anniversary show in 2007?

“Just some minor music changes and little dialogue changes, and maybe the humour is a little drier.”

As Hull Truck prepares to leave Spring Street for Ferensway, what are your feelings, 25 years on from being appointed the company’s artistic director?

“This time has come up much quicker than I ever expected, and leaving this building means more to me than I thought it would, but the new theatre is phenomenal and Hull Truck had to move on, and probably should have done some time ago.

“We want to grow and develop but not outside what we’re known for. We want to take our audience with us. There’s no point opening with a season of German plays. That would be suicide… but I think that’s what a Coventry theatre did last year.”

What is your credo for the way forward?

“There’s that thing of theatres thinking about what they should be doing, when theatre should about putting on things that make people think about their lives around them. That philosophy has worked for us for 25 years; it’s on the hard drive and there’s no point now changing the way you play the game.”

Finally John, when will the new theatre open?

“It moves! We’re hoping within a month we can say when and where. Well, we know where; hopefully we’ll know when soon.”

• Bouncers runs at Hull Truck Theatre, Spring Street, Hull, from today until February 14. Box office: 01482 323638.

Did you know?

The interviewee before John Godber for the post of Hull Truck Theatre’s artistic director in 1984 was a certain Danny Boyle, now the newly crowned best director at the Golden Globes for Slumdog Millionaire.

“He pulled the short straw. He went to Hollywood and I went to Hull,” says John.

York Theatre Royal artistic director Damian Cruden on the abiding appeal of Bouncers

“It’s a fantastic play; it’s total rock’n’roll theatre. It’s very, very funny, but it’s full of substance too. It’s a play about the social order of things in this country, and it’s about why do we work all week and then go out on Thursday, Friday, Saturday night – young people and not so young people – and drink it all away?

“It’s also about their energy, their sense of humour – it’s very Yorkshire – and it’s about music and dancing, and the hope and expectation at six o’clock and the reality at 2.30 in the morning, when you’ve no money left for the taxi home, and you’ve lost your coat.”

• Cruden has directed Bouncers nine times: three times for Hull Truck; once at the Sheffield Crucible; twice at the Chester Gateway; once in London; twice at York Theatre Royal.

Fact file

Name: Bouncers.

Occupation: Cult John Godber play, presenting a “microscopic study of urban nightlife in Anytown, any weekend”, as seen through the eyes and felt through the fists of the four doormen of the apocalypse.

Born: August 15, 1977, 12.30pm, Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Written on his sister’s Petite typewriter by John Godber, then 21, at his mother’s house.

Inspiration: Kiko’s in Pontefract, a Polynesian-style night club with fake palm trees.

First performance: As a two-hander about a hard night’s drinking in a northern night club, starring Godber, who became a prolific playwright, Hull Truck artistic director and film-maker, and Peter Geeves, the orange man in the Tango TV ads.

First audience: Edinburgh Fringe 1977, two people, a tramp and a critic. The critic left after five minutes; the tramp swayed on stage, joining in with his own improvisation. Tickets cost 50 pence.

First professional performance: Yorkshire Actors Company, Rotherham Arts Centre, March 25 1983.

First review: “Mr Godber and company have evolved their own distinctive style which says something about the tinny, tacky, curiously barren quality of disco culture” – the Guardian’s Michael Billington, September 1984.

Famous Bouncers’ bouncers: York actor Mark Addy (The Full Monty); Jack Coleman (Dynasty’s Steven Colby and Heroes’ Noah Bennet); John McArdle (Brookside’s Billy Corkhill); Adam Fogerty (Rugby League beefcake prop forward for St Helens, Warrington and Keighley and boxer); John Altman (Nick Cotton in EastEnders).

Celebrities spotted in audience: Jack Nicholson, Steven Spielberg, Joan Collins, Tatum O’Neal, Eddie Murphy, The Grateful Dead.

Awards: Bouncers was chosen as one of the Top 100 plays of the 20th century by the National Theatre. Also won five Jefferson Awards in Chicago and seven Los Angeles Drama Critics’ Circle Awards.

Speaking in foreign tongues: Bouncers in French is Les Videurs; in Dutch, Buitenwippers; in Serbo-Croat, Izbaciuaci.

John Godber on Bouncers: “It’s a celebration of the fantastic Bacchanalian aspects of urban night life. Forget Look Back in Anger, let’s get out there – let’s get pissed up.”

Godber on Bouncers’ longevity: “The disco experience has undergone many changes – house, rave, garage – but one thing remains the same: young people, loud music, drugs, and the hope that tonight you’ll meet Mr Right, or have a fight or end up mostly like I did. Eating a dodgy kebab and vowing never to do it again… until next Friday.”