FIFTEEN years ago, Nobby Dimon left Harrogate Theatre after eight years as director of theatre in education, going on to set up the rural touring company North Country Theatre in Richmond.

Dimon is one of the unsung heroes of North Yorkshire theatre, bringing merriment and miraculous drama to the village halls, community centres and gardens of the Broad Acres and beyond.

Now, this autumn’s bravura production finds him coming full circle, reuniting with Harrogate Theatre for the first time for a co-production that was premiered in the spa town for four nights and is now visiting everywhere from Arncliffe to Yarm.

Writer-director Dimon takes theatre seriously but his plays tend to be less than serious: you may recall his affectionate re-creation of Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps that Patrick Barlow later turned into an international hit.

This time Federico Garcia Lorca’s Andalucian feuding family parable Blood Wedding is transferred from the Spanish Civil War to the internecine disputes of the Yorkshire Dales farming community of the Thirties.

Dimon is not alone in finding Lorca’s portentous plays melodramatic, making the intense Spaniard ripe for a comic reinterpretation that here is bolstered by Dimon’s love of Stella Gibbons’s novel Cold Comfort Farm, a parody of identical vintage to Lorca’s play.

I hold back from describing Dimon’s adaptation as a “send-up” because, for all his lightness of touch and the irreverent presence of flamenco-dancing sheep, he gives due weight to the oppressive burden and isolation of village life that drives Leonard Luckhurst (Mark Cronfield) to swap the North Riding for Southern Spain to fight the revolutionary cause with the International Brigade.

On his return, Leonard finds his childhood sweetheart, Barbara Ottershaugh (Sophia Hatfield), is to marry old rival Daniel Braithwaite (Lane Paul Stewart) in a union of farmlands arranged by her conniving father (Nobby Dimon).

So unfolds the story of Three Fights, Two Weddings And A Funeral, where Lorca’s deeply significant Moon and Death make way for Dimon’s Dairy Maid of Doom.

Dimon is a gifted, concise and witty storyteller, one who wins his regular battle against financial constraints and touring practicalities through boundless imagination – and the assistance of designer Simon Pell.

The basic barn set can be set up anywhere, and around it props come alive, none more so than when hats on pitchforks denote wedding guests from the Capstick family (note the punning name).

Better still, a sheet painted as green Dales fields then covers bodies, becoming an impromptu grave.

In Harrogate, the acting was bedding in, but on its travels A Blood Wedding In Wensleydale! will prove itself to be North Country’s boldest triumph yet.

Tickets: northcountrytheatre.com