ONE of the most successful playwrights working today, Richard Bean, author of One Man Two Guvnors and Pitcairn, which comes to Malvern Theatres next week, took a slightly circuitous route to his career.

He was working as an occupational psychologist in industry, "but I had burned out and had difficulty getting out of bed in the morning", a situation that coincided with the rise of a new breed of stand-up, including the likes of Alexei Sayle.

"A club in Hackney had open spots where anybody could do five minutes. I did that just for a laugh - I got one the first time, and died a death the second, but it didn't stop me," he recalls. "One of the things I enjoyed about it was that it started me writing, and I did it for six years in the end.

His eureka moment came, he says, when he saw The Changing Room by David Storey at The Royal Court. "It was a bit of an eye opener and told me how I might be able to write the play I'd always wanted to write about the Hull bread factory (where he had worked between leaving school and going to university). I learned a lot from David Storey and copied his structure for Toast, his first play.

Pitcairn, which takes up the story of Christian Fletcher after the mutiny is a new play, written at the suggestion of director Max Stafford-Clark. "I'd worked with Max on The Big Fella and he'd come across this book, Mr Bligh's Bad Language, which got him interested in Pitcairn. He asked me if I knew what happened after the mutiny. So I read these books and thought what an extraordinary bit of history it was. It's a genuinely fascinating chunk of British history because we don't know what happened. There are only two accounts and both are written by the victors.

"Nine mutineers, 12 Tahitian women and six Tahitian men rocked up on Pitcairn - 10 years later there was only one man standing. So one account is that one man's story, and was the only account from the male side, but a few years late one Tahitian woman gave a very different account. So it's still up for grabs, which was one reason it fascinated me.

The play is not what happened on Pitcairn Island. It's more about the themes and motivations. They started out believing they were creating this Utopia, but it soon became a dystopia - I think it's Lord of the Flies for grown-ups. It really does do that 'Oh my God, this is paradise, look how we've screwed it up.'

As a new play, rather than a new version, Richard says Pitcairn is much harder work: "The great thing about doing a new version is that you can get yourself a bowl of Kellogs's, go into the shed and turn the heating on and you know the next scene has been mapped out for you."

Pitcairn runs at Malvern Theatres from Tuesday, November 17 to Saturday, November 22