BEAN there, done that, wrote a play about it.

While it would be an over-simplification, even wrong, to say East Riding playwright Richard Bean always draws on his own experiences, let’s stack up some evidence.

He worked in a bread factory for a year after leaving school, leading to the play Toast. He played cricket for year after year, run after run, until his knees gave “Out”. Cue The English Game, his drama in the field of flannelled fools. He grew up in Hull, once the hub of the fishing industry, so here comes Under The Whaleback.

His first full-length work, Of Rats And Men in 1996, was set in a psychology lab: an apt locale for a play by a former social psychology student at Loughborough University who became an occupational psychologist, before later turning to stand-up comedy and play writing.

York has been far too slow to pick up on Bean’s feast of dark-humoured drama, but better late than never, his 2005 commission for the Royal Court Theatre, the pig-farming tale Harvest, will visit the Grand Opera House next month on its national tour.

Harvest, winner of the 2005 Critics Circle award for best new play, fuses psychology and comedy with another of Bean’s specialist subjects, farming, in the story of the rise and fall of a rural smallholding through four generations of the same East Riding family from the Great War to the present day.

“This play is one of those amalgams of everything,” says Richard. “My mother and father both have their roots in the country, although my dad was born in the city.

“He trained as a blacksmith from 14 and did a seven-year apprenticeship, an old-fashioned apprenticeship where you’re supposed to marry the master’s daughter… but he didn’t fancy her, so he went back to Hull.”

Even after giving up the blacksmith’s bellows to become a policeman, Richard’s father kept two sows. “He always said he’d made more out of selling weeners than being a police constable for the first three years – and there are pictures of me riding a sow rather than a horse,” says Richard.

His mother’s father was a farmer and his great, great uncle Tom used to farm at Atwick, near Hornsea. “He was a big, tough farmer and they say the only time he cried was when they took his horses for the First World War,” Richard recalls.

His grandfather had a field that he rented to a farmer for grazing for a herd of Holstein cattle. “My grandfather was ageing by then, and my Uncle Bill thought the farmer was taking advantage of an old man by not paying his rent,” says Richard.

These rent arrears annoyed Uncle Bill so much, he stole the herd and made arrangements to put them in another field.

“The farmer said, ‘Where’s my herd?’, and my uncle said, ‘Where’s your rent?’. There are all sorts of stories like that in the play.”

Bean’s half-uncle – or “my father’s brother’s wife’s brother” – provides the basis for the story in the second half of Harvest.

“He had 2,000 sows on a small piece of land, towards Withernsea. They were doing incredibly well in the early days, but when I spoke with them they had gone bust when there was a wave of redundancies,” says Richard.

“They were losing £3,000 a week, feeding 2,000 pigs. Imagine feeing 2,000 people. The food bill was incredible. When they went bust they lost everything: the farm, the land, the buildings and two houses.”

Once they had had visions of moving to the Bahamas.

“Now they’re living in a perfectly clean bungalow and he’s working as a clerk for a transport company, and his knees are shot – when pigs don’t like you, they rush at your knees,” says Richard.

Bankruptcy, boarded-up buildings, burglary and death all feature in Bean’s story of struggle.

“There are tough scenes in the play, truthful but very difficult scenes, which is important because there is the kind of drawing-room theatre that’s there to help you forget your troubles, and then there are plays that are more truthful and are cathartic, like this one, because you realise you’re not alone when you’re suffering,” says Richard.

“But let’s not forget, it’s also a funny play. There’s plenty to laugh at on pig farms, or that’s what pig farmers tell me. If one of the pigs gets out, it’s always funny.”

•The Royal Court production of Harvest tours the Grand Opera House, York, from February 10 to 14, 7.30pm plus Wednesday and Saturday matinees at 2.30pm. Tickets: £13 to £22 on 0844 847 2322.