GREEN Hammerton company Badapple Theatre’s latest Theatre On Your Doorstep rural touring project sets off on its travels this week for 35 performances of Kate Bramley’s new play, The Unlikely Dads.

Kate’s quirky comic tale of two friends who become fathers late in life, under unusual circumstances, receives its premiere at Marton-cum-Grafton Memorial Hall at 7.30pm tomorrow, before touring village halls across Yorkshire and beyond.

Written and directed by company founder Kate, the two-hander will bring professional performances to places with limited access to the arts due to geography with the aim of providing “genuine access to a full theatre experience for all”.

Badapple’s specifically-designed sets and plays are busy revitalising the smallest of rural venues in Yorkshire as well as bringing communities together to enjoy a social occasion.

“My priority is to give the audience entertainment of the highest, professional quality,” Kate says. “There should be no barrier to age or venue size when it comes to staging original work and this is what Theatre On Your Doorstep is about: touring ultra small-scale village halls to provide a cracking night out at the theatre.”

Badapple regular Robert Angell – who can be seen in York Theatre Royal’s The Railway Children at the National Railway Museum this summer – will be joined on tour by Northern Broadsides actor Robert Took. They play two friends whose usual weekly meetings at their club to discuss The Beatles and The Likely Lads are now re-located to a more baby friendly location, as their old and new lives clash head on, with comic repercussions and a life-changing twist in the tale.

Kate has come across a number of older new dads in the past, “but that wasn’t the basis for the play,” she says. “The discussions that did arise from it were about when dads are the main carer, and how, when a young dad walks into a room with 27 women in there, the tumble weed drifts by.

“The way my brain works, I started thinking ‘what’s the comic potential in this situation’, though really it can be a serious one.”

Then add The Likely Lads to The Unlikely Dads. “There’s comedy in having two friends who have gone from being ‘Likely Lads’ to being where they are now, in charge of babies, so there’s references to them being called Bob and Terry and thinking back to the old Bob and Terry in the TV series,” says Kate.

“It’s a story that’s ripe for comedy, though we take our characters quite seriously but we poke fun at the situations they find themselves in, having to endure various buggy-based pastimes, starting with the buggy boogie.”

The comic interplay of Angell and company newcomer Took will be vital to the show. “Originally I had a framework for this play to be a three-hander, but in the end I chose just to hear the two male voices. All the stories come through their voices as I was interested in how the men saw the world throughout,” says Kate.

“I felt it was more exciting just to have these two men who have been friends for 28 years and know each other inside out, so that they fight like a married couple.”

As a further incentive to see The Unlikely Lads, Kate’s production boasts the music of her partner, Sony Award-winning folk songwriter Jez Lowe, who just happens to have been nominated for two BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards this year. The ceremony takes place on Wednesday at the Millennium Centre, Cardiff. Watch this space.

• Badapple Theatre’s The Unlikely Dads is on tour from tomorrow until May 31. See badappletheatre.com for full details.