ONLY one condition stood in the way of Barrie Rutter's invitation to Blake Morrison to adapt A Servant Of Two Masters for Northern Broadsides.

"I rang Blake in January and said, do you think you could do me a new version of an Italian classic by mid-April?" recalls the Broadsides artistic director. "He said, as long as it doesn't get in the way of my running marathon on the Scilly Isles'.

"Blake tells a lovely story of the winner finishing, pulling on his gumboots, climbing into his boat and rowing home!"

Morrison first made his mark on Broadsides with The Cracked Pot, his northern English twist on a German play, and he was itching to do another comedy. "Though there was humour in the versions of Antigone and Oedipus he did for us, he was really hankering after the language of comedy," says Barrie.

"We'd done Crackpot at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in 1995 and on tour in 1996 and 2001, and people were still screaming for it, so I was desperate to get them off my back and Blake was desperate to write another comedy. So there were two desperations and, if I do it as well as I should, then we should have another Crackpot."

Goldoni's Italian play has been renamed A Man With Two Gaffers and moved from the Venetian waterways to the Leeds-Liverpool Canal at Skipton in the 1850s. Characters but not characteristics have been changed, so the play now has a pig-headed farmer and a pompous vicar as well as lovesick lad and a lass reluctantly engaged to man who is meant to be dead.

"Classic relationships never change and they've not changed since Greek tragedies; only the technology has changed; the stuff of human relations hasn't," says Barrie. "All good farcical situations have their grounding in truth and possibility and usually money and sex, and they're all here!"

Barrie says Blake has taken Goldini at his word, responding to the advice to be true to the mores, local colour and language of your own milieu by creating a version true to 1850s Yorkshire. "The class system exists in the play but that was in a foreign language. As soon as you translate that into English it becomes posh and that's just not Broadsides' world and it's not Blake's world," says Barrie.

Instead, the setting is now the world of farming and industry in Skipton. "In Italian comedy, there were the stock characters of commedia dell'arte, and Goldoni was trying to move away from that to make them more rounded. When you then move the characters into another language, that fleshing out of character becomes even more prominent," Barrie says.

"So we've made no attempt whatsoever to acknowledge commedia. I don't see the point. It's mothballs, isn't it?" Yes, Barrie, it is indeed.

Rather than leaving the play in mothballs, the characters are being customised to suit a Broadsides production. Not least Mr Rutter's title role, the man with the two gaffers, who is usually played by a younger man. "I'm not a 26-year-old man leaping around like the Truffaldinos of old, and the storytelling and comic business will have to reflect that I'm an older person of 60. But the audience won't see a decrepit ancient doing the business. It's me and that's it!"

The potential for comedy in Truffaldino, or Arthur Dodge and Arthur D Cheetham as he now is, remains the same. "It's his ability to get out of tricky situations which, of course, then lands him in other situations or other people in situations, but he's never tongue-tied. Yes, there's the question of plausibility, but you have to go with it; it's a play, for goodness sake."

Barrie had played the equally duplicitous lead in The Cracked Pot too. "The difference is that Truffladoni/Arthur is subservient, where Judge Adam was dominant and you thought, if he's in charge of justice in Skipton, what chance have we got?' None!"

The Man With Two Gaffers, Northern Broadsides in partnership with York Theatre Royal, at York Theatre Royal, tomorrow until September 16. Tour itinerary includes Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough, November 20 to 25. Box office: York, 01904 623568; Scarborough, 01723 370541.