Nick Lane, Doncaster playwright and Hull Truck Theatre literary manager, is working with Sheffield’s Reform Theatre Company for the third time in the wake of My Favourite Summer and Housebound.

All those Yorkshire associations reiterate the northern focus of a season of three world premieres at Harrogate Theatre, where Reform has become an associate company. All Points North already has launched Northern Broadsides’ political satire A Government Inspector and on Wednesday I was at the opening night for North Country Theatre’s thriller The Lighthouse On Shivering Sands.

Lane’s new work is a dark tale of second chances that he calls a “ Wild West Riding revenger’s comedy” with its combination of punches, punchlines and pugilism. This debut looks in good shape already, although Lane says he may yet wish to tweak it to make it fighting fit.

It draws on two stories, the first having prompted Reform artistic director Keith Hukin to commission Lane, the second torn from Lane’s own memories. Put them together and Lane has penned a flinty comedy about two friends with very different outlooks on life.

Tom (Kivan Dene), the older by four years, is foolhardy, even reckless, chancing his arm by daring to date Zoe (Amy Walsh), blonde goddess daughter of local psycho Flynn (David Walker).

Best mate Sy (Ryan Cerenko) is back in the north with his fiancée Vicky (Walsh again) after university studies in Southampton.

He is a journalist now, and a combination of his job and loyalty to the errant Tom only adds to Vicky’s disquiet when she already dislikes her own job and new home in equal measure.

Yet friendship is all important to Sy, so when Flynn demands to take on the much smaller Tom in a boxing match, he does everything to support him, They seek out Foster (Walker again), a former boxer with a penchant for wearing little more than his underpants and an embittered, abrasive streak after he was imprisoned on Flynn’s word that he was a “kiddy fiddler”.

Foster – don’t ever call him Mr Foster – sees teaching Tom the basics of boxing for the clash as his golden ticket to revenge and a second chance for him to rekindle a relationship with Zoe, the daughter that Flynn took away from him to bring up himself.

On the surface, this hardly sounds the stuff of comedy, but Lane is an increasingly skilled writer at mining humour from dark materials without ever compromising that darkness – and the sting in his tale could not be more painful.

The climactic bout is on a par with John Godber’s Rugby League game in Up’n’Under and just as theatrically inventive: the high point of Hukin’s tough yet sometimes tender production, which is as raw and rough edged as Carl Davies’s set design of a stone arch plus a few chairs.

All four performances are a knockout, especially Walker’s turn as Foster, the wronged outcast.

Seconds Out, Reform Theatre Company, Harrogate Theatre Studio, until Saturday.

Box office: 01423 502116 or harrogatetheatre.co.uk