PLAYS are coming so thick and fast from Hull writer Richard Bean, there is a danger of Bean’s magic wearing off.

The ashes of controversy are still aglow from his National Theatre debut with the immigration play England People Very Nice, his portrait of the culture clashes of Bethnal Green’s changing communities that led to wrongful accusations of his being a racist.

Bean has never been afraid to be outspoken, scathing in his wit, and dark in his perspective, but always with warmth towards his characters, their warts and all.

Pub Quiz Is Life is made of colder stuff, the warmth only found in the lighter with which soldier-turned-drug boss Lee (Marc Bolton) heats the heroin to assuage the crippling pain of his father’s multiple sclerosis in this latter-day kitchen-sink drama.

Bean has returned his focus to his home city, the city that has lost its fishing industry and its crown as the official Crap Town of Britain, but gained a Premiership football team, a new theatre, a spiralling drug culture and one of those money-no-object, power-suited agencies for regeneration, Hull Advance, which believes chic shopping and iconic bridges are the way to new milk and honey.

All these are on the Bean radar, and so is the recession, the soldier’s lot in Afghanistan, the Government’s griping attitude to expensive drugs on the NHS, euthanasia, adultery, and the frictions of clashing religions, where “they can’t all be right but they can all be wrong”. For the first time, Bean’s attitudes come with platitudes, especially in a sulphurous rant by Bolton’s Lee.

Question: where does the Pub Quiz of the title come into the story? Answer: Lee, out of job and out of joint since Afghanistan, is the captain of a pub quiz team, determined to beat the rivals led by his former teachers. In his team are his father Bunny (the outstanding David Hargreaves), bemoaning the loss of dignity for the working man in a feminised job market; blunt drug dealer Woody (Adrian Hood, the deadpan honey monster of Hull Truck); and the highly unlikely Melissa, the leggy Surrey-bred filly from Hull Advance (a posh-totty Esther Hall from the BT adverts).

Asking the questions is Sarah Parks’s Mabel, the busty, lusty landlady with more late husbands than Chaucer’s Wife of Bath and more putdowns than an abattoir. She is a glorious caricature, but as her pier-end jokes pile up, this ever-blacker social drama flounders, feeling rushed and yet slowing up, with Gareth Tudor Price’s production drowning in bitterness before the overdue finalé.

It would be wrong to suggest this is half-baked Bean but just as John Godber is wont to re-write his plays, so Bean could yet bring sharper life to Pub Quiz Is Life, a play that feels a little too Bean There, Done That Already.

Pub Quiz Is Life, Hull Truck Theatre, Hull, until October 3. Box office: 01482 325012.