Interview - Richard Bean: Bean means business with a look at the Irish

The playwright isn't a particularly emotional sort, but on the morning we speak he has been awake for some time, glued to the television since the early hours, watching the Chilean miners finally break free from their underground hell hole.

"It's just had the most profound effect on me," says Bean, a former industrial psychologist and stand-up comedian.

"I've never known anything like it."

Quite soon, however, Bean finds an analogy. While in no way diminishing the gravity of what the miners have been through, he, unsurprisingly, goes to sport.

"Obviously, the stakes are much higher, but it's like a football match that goes into extra time – or cricket," says Bean. Cricket is a passion Bean and I have shared and indulged since we first met on the day his award-winning play, Harvest, was revealed to the London stage in 2005.

"The final day of a Test match can be incredibly exciting and emotional – and we know that it becomes much more emotional if you have invested yourself in the first four days of the game.

"It's sort of like that. Watching the miners finally come out is so moving and a part of that is the fact that we have been watching this unfold for such a long time."

Sport and men trapped in a situation. They'd be the playwright's specialist subjects were he to ever appear on Mastermind.

From his first play, Toast, through to Up On Roof, which appeared at Hull Truck in 2006, Bean's plays are all about men trapped in a situation. In his early plays, that meant trapped in their own lives, in jobs. As his canvas expanded and he began to tell bigger stories, at the heart remained the idea of men trapped in a space together.

Clearly, he is going to write a play about the Chilean miners, isn't he?

Bean laughs and insists that he isn't, although he does say: "I guarantee you that, within two years, there will be a play touring England and it will be set in the dark and will feature men trapped underground."

We talk a little longer and Bean says actually, maybe he will write the play himself.

It would fit well into his oeuvre, which now spans 14 plays, The Big Fellah, coming to York next week, marking number 14.

The play has been almost a decade in gestation, the result of a trip to New York in the months following 9/11.

"There were four of us playwrights sent there to write something as a response to the terror attacks on the city," says Bean.

"I started writing about Islamic terrorism and I realised it was too on the nose, too obvious a thing to be writing about."

Bean looked at the city a little deeper and came to some disturbing and, some would argue, deeply controversial conclusions.

"I realised that so many of the people who work for the police, the fire department, the Port Authority, were Irish American," says Bean. "They had such sentimentality for Ireland and the Irish. Essentially, anyone in a uniform in New York claims Irish heritage. The irony was that so many of those that died in uniforms as a result of the terrorist attacks on 9/11 were supporters of Irish terrorists during the Troubles."

Told you it was controversial. With his last play, England People Very Nice, tackling immigration, Bean and controversy have become as synonymous as fish with chips.

The controversial revelation of what Bean considered sentimentality towards the IRA by New York uniformed officers, led to The Big Fellah.

In the play young fireman Michael Doyle decides to live up to his Irish heritage by joining the IRA. He's recruited by Costello, the charismatic Big Fellah, who wants to use Doyle's brownstone apartment in The Bronx as a safe house for an escaped killer. But it soon becomes clear that someone is leaking information to the FBI. The play spans three decades, from 1972 to 1999. It is a time period that gives Bean the chance to really flex his writing muscles and the four-man IRA cell in New York allows him to explore his favoured subject of trapped men.

"There's a fireman, a policeman, an entrepreneur – and an actual Irishman who is on the run and staying in this safe house in New York, a sort of Joe Doherty figure," says Bean.

"I think the play says something about the terrorist threat we're seeing today.

"In no way am I saying these people supported Irish terrorism therefore they somehow deserve what happened to them. The play is a way to look at what's happening and ask some questions about it."

And, of course, a chance for Bean to once again find the characteristic humour he often seems to find in a space where men are trapped together.

The Big Fellah, York Theatre Royal, November 2 to 6. 01904 623568.