RICHARD Bean often wonders what Norman Drydale would make of it all.

For 18 months, the pair, one an impressionable young school leaver, the other a hardened old trawlerman with enough salty stories to sink a battleship, stood side by side on the night-shift production line.

For 12 hours a night, six nights a week, they would watch bread rise in the ovens at Spillers factory in Wheeler Street, west Hull, swapping stories and banter until day break.

There were rumours seadog Norman won thousands on the football pools and retired. Nearly four decades later, Bean is the toast of the theatrical world.

Last year, his raucous comedy One Man, Two Guvnors, starring rotund funnyman James Corden, became a smash hit in London's West End, breaking box office records at the National Theatre and The Adelphi Theatre, on the fashionable Strand, where it took more than £7 million in advance ticket sales alone.

Last week, it won the Best New Play award at the Critics' Circle Theatre Awards. Next month, it will transfer to the showbiz heart of the city that never sleeps, to the Music Box Theatre on Broadway, New York.

It has been the biggest hit of the playwright's already distinguished theatrical career.

Not bad, he says, for a hairdresser's son from Corona Drive, east Hull, who didn't consider picking up his playwright's pen until his mid-30s.

"I shouldn't say this," he whispers conspiratorially. "But I don't think you should be going into theatre until you're in your 30s. When you're young you should be out going to gigs and partying. Go to the theatre when you're old enough to just want to sit down."

Supping tea in a Greek café off the Strand, the 55-year-old playwright is on good form. It's cold out and he's huddled into a Bay City Rollers-style tartan scarf and brown leather jacket, but he's obviously basking in the warm glow of success.

He's just been up to Corden's dressing room following a lively matinee performance to find his star dripping with sweat – "they have to have a completely different costume for the evening show because he just gets so drenched," confides Bean.

Later, he's heading across town to the National Theatre to discuss his next play, a swashbuckling adaptation of Alexandre Dumas's The Count Of Monte Cristo.

It's fair to say the former baker is on a roll.

"This one has really taken off," he smiles with the deadpan understatement he honed during the five years he spent working as a stand-up comedian.

"It's just one of those things where all the stars seemed to align and people have really bought into it. It's certainly the best reviews I've ever had and the audiences have been great."

The play came together when Sir Nicholas Hytner, the artistic director of the National Theatre who had directed Bean's controversial 2009 comedy England People Very Nice, floated the idea of producing "a piece of pure knockabout escapism".

Based on an 18th Century Commedia dell'Arte play called The Servant Of Two Masters, Bean has relocated the story to 1963 Brighton, with Corden playing his hungry hero Francis Henshall, a bumbling minder trying to keep both his gangster boss and a murder suspect happy.

"The play happened because Nick and James bumped into each other in the corner shop near where they live. They had worked together before on The History Boys," says Bean.

"I think James was going through his bad boy stage, enjoying himself, and this was Nick's way of getting him back on the straight and narrow. He started looking for a show for him and then they asked me if I wanted to get involved."

One Man, Two Guvnors may be a London smash based on an Italian comedy, but Bean is quick to hail Hull as the inspiration behind much of his work and says one day, "in his dotage", he would like to return to live in the East Riding.

"When does your dotage start?" he laughs. "Maybe I'm already in it.

"There's something about Hull and East Yorkshire that makes good writers. When a place has its own distinct personality, it breeds writers with a distinct personality, too.

"They say write about what you know and all I've ever done is write about people I know," he adds with more than a hint of self-deprecation.

"Most of my characters are based on aunts and uncles. Norman Drydale is the template for every trawlerman I've ever written about.

"People always say 'I don't know how you came up with that character'. Well, I didn't really. The amount of imagination that goes into it is minimal. I just write about people I know. I'm just good at remembering stuff. There's no magical secret to it."

When Corden jets off to the US next month, the British version of the show will relocate to the Theatre Royal, in London's Haymarket, with a whole new cast including Jodie Prenger, S Club 7's Hannah Spearritt and Hull's own Martin Barrass, who will take over the role of a doddering waiter with a death wish called Alfie.

The production will also tour later this year with the closest venue to Bean's home town likely to be in Leeds.

The chances of the writer returning to Hull Truck, which premiered his play Up On The Roof, about the 1976 Hull prison riots, and staged his dark drama Under The Whaleback, charting the lives of a three generations of Hull trawlermen, is "unlikely in the foreseeable future" he says regretfully.

His loyalty to close friend Gareth Tudor Price, Truck's former artistic director who left the theatre under a cloud last year, means he would find it "uncomfortable" returning.

In the near future, the Hull man is too busy focusing on the myriad of doors that are opening to him after his West End success – one of which is a hush hush Hollywood project he's not allowed to talk about.

"What would Norman Drydale make of it all? I have no idea. I hope he'd be pleased," ponders Bean.

"Norman was a genuine free-thinking man, an inspiration. I was a young lad with nothing to talk about and he was full of stories about Iceland and Greenland. I owe him a lot, he's been an inspiration throughout my career."