IF YOU have bemoaned the lack of “serious theatre” shows at the Grand Opera House, York, stop those thoughts. The new season has two plays that fit the bill: Hull playwright Richard Bean’s Harvest and Tim Firth’s high comedy Sign Of The Times.

Running in York from February 10 to 14 in a touring production by London’s Royal Court Theatre, Bean’s rural drama won the Critics Circle Award for Best New Play and was nominated for both the Olivier Award and Evening Standard Award in the same category.

In Harvest, on May 14 1875 Lord Primrose Agar, drunk as a skunk, wagered one of his tenant farmers, Orlando Harrison, that his new border collie pup, Jip, would outlive the 94-year-old Harrison. The prize would be 82 acres of up and down known as Kilham Wold Farm, near Driffield in East Yorkshire. Thirteen years later, having buried his dog, Agar shook hands with Orlando and conferred on the Harrisons a century of struggle. Bean’s epic comedy spans 91 years, from 1914 to 2005, charting the rise and fall of the English rural smallholding through four generations of the same family.

The touring cast will be announced at a later date. By comparison, the cast for Firth’s Sign Of The Times is in place already, well ahead of its April 14 to 18 run in York.

Wild At Heart star Stephen Tompkinson will be reuniting with Lancastrian writer Firth for the first time since their award winning television series Preston Front and Christmas comedy The Flint Street Nativity.

In a comedy about the art of achieving happiness in unpredictable times, Tompkinson will play Frank Tollit, who for 25 years has put up giant letters on the sides of buildings. That, however, is his talent rather than his ambition. The latter involves letters of a very different sort, literary ones, and his lack of success is driving him to the edge.

•Tickets can be booked on 0844 847 2322 or online at grandoperahouseyork.org.uk