O.C. THEATER / JAN HERMAN : Bad Boy and Hermit of Hull : A candid John Godber directs work on reclusive English poet Philip Larkin.

And now, ladies and gentleman, direct from England, the theatrical bad boy of Hull, John Godber, impresario of the Hull Truck Theatre Company and a man who doesn’t mind speaking the unvarnished truth.

Here to direct Alan Plater’s “Sweet Sorrow,” opening Wednesday at the Irvine Barclay Theatre, as part of the Orange County Festival of Britain, Godber volunteered three reasons for his participation in the combination arts festival and retail promotion:

“One, we were invited. Two, it’s great weather. And three, I obviously wouldn’t have come all this way if I didn’t have two meetings (to pitch movie and theater projects) at two different places in Los Angeles.”

Such candor seems typical of the blunt, 34-year-old former rugby player, who is best remembered in Southern California for his play “Bouncers,” a visceral work about a working-class disco and four thuggish doormen that waltzed off with seven awards from the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle in 1985.

In his frankness, Godber hardly spares himself or the Hull Truck Company, which takes its name from two things: the city in Yorkshire where it was founded 20 years ago and the fact that it used to tour in a truck.

He recalls that when the New York Times termed Hull Truck’s most recent traveling production “wildly uneven,” the critic was being kind. “It was an abortion, and we all knew it,” Godber said, referring to a modern-dress version of “Romeo and Juliet” that played last summer in Stony Brook, N.Y., with Roland Gift of the English pop group Fine Young Cannibals as Romeo.

Others come in for a share of the Godber-styled truth. He likes to spread it around.

After he saw American playwright Lanford Wilson’s critically acclaimed “Burn This” in London, for example, Godber wondered what all the fuss was about. “I could watch that stuff on the telly,” he said in a recent interview at the Irvine Barclay.

Meanwhile, he more or less dismisses Tom Stoppard, one of England’s most intellectual playwrights, and Alan Ayckbourn, one of its most commercially successful. Stoppard is an obsessive overwriter concerned with “social linguistics,” he contended, and Ayckbourn plays it safe by “doing everthing exactly the same.”

As for London’s vaunted National Theatre, “it’s a joke,” Godber asserted. “Who do they play to? American tourists. If the company traveled, that would make it a truly national theater instead of a metropolitan theater, which it really is. Its attitude to the outlying reaches (of England) is, ‘Let them eat cake.’ ”

Cake is definitely not among the Hull Truck offerings. Try fishing, cocktail waitresses, education, weightlifting and judo. Godber has treated all of those subjects and more in a dozen or so plays of his own staged by the theater company since he became its artistic director in 1984.

In fact, it was Godber’s play about rugby, “Up ‘n’ Under,” that brought considerable national acclaim to Hull Truck in 1985 when the production won a Laurence Olivier Award for comedy of the year.

“Our work in Hull generally is an attempt to demystify aspects of theater,” Godber said. “Hence, I’ve written about things that have a wide panorama. I suppose I’ve become known for a physical style that is energetic and actor-oriented. I’m interested in getting away from ‘picture box’ theater. That’s what Stanislavsky and the Moscow Art Theatre are really about.

“In England today there’s still that sense of dissociation between the audience and what’s on the stage. Pictures, doors, rooms--they’re all the bric-a-brac of everyday existence that get in the way. I want to get away from that fourth-wall realism. I want to make theater accessible to people who don’t usually go.”

Given Godber’s urge to break the traditional mold with an aggressive sense of form and an extroverted approach to content, how did he ever get hooked on “Sweet Sorrow,” a play whose subject is the reclusive English poet Philip Larkin?

Larkin, who died in 1985 at the age of 63, was such a gentle, introverted loner that he was dubbed “the hermit of Hull.” A bald, bespectacled, stammering librarian, he once declared that he lived in Hull precisely because it was so far away from everything on the northeast English coast that nobody would bother to visit him.

According to his obituary, he never married, never entertained, declined to give poetry readings, rarely accepted dinner invitations and always kept the curtains drawn in his house to prevent sunlight from harming his books. Needless to say, he also shunned interviews.

Larkin was not even a prolific author. When the post of poet laureate was offered to him a year before he died, he turned it down, noting that he hadn’t published any poems for a decade. He wrote only four slim volumes of poetry along with two novels, two collections of essays and a newspaper jazz column. Of his meager output he once said: “I didn’t give poetry up, it gave me up.”

Yet what little there is of Larkin’s spare, nervy poems struck a chord in tens of thousands of people from all walks of life. In February, 1986, a huge crowd packed Westminster Abbey for a memorial service in honor of Larkin. And that, Godber explains, is what made him wonder whether a play might be written about him and his poetry.

The starting point was to ask Alan Plater, who knew Larkin and shared his lifelong love of jazz, if he felt a theater piece was worth writing in the first place, Godber said. Plater is a celebrated playwright and television writer in England, best known here for his 1989 Emmy Award-winning PBS miniseries, “A Very British Coup,” and his adaptation of “Fortunes of War.”

“Alan thought about the question for quite some time,” Godber recalled. “And then we decided between ourselves that if there was a story it was the story of how this so-called recluse had affected people’s lives unbeknownst to himself. And, by extension, it became an examination of the artist’s role in society. What it is, and how much he is responsible for the reactions invoked by his work.

“Where I come into this is to determine something about the poet that is not precious and is also true to the work. There is no point in me getting Alan Plater’s script and saying, ‘Right. Four bouncers are going to play it, and it’s going to be very visceral and vivid and alive,’ and then have nothing to do with Larkin.”

The result of Godber’s and Plater’s collaboration is a play centering on four people who have met annually for the past four years on Feb. 14, the day of the Westminster Abbey memorial, to commemorate Larkin by drinking wine, reading his poems and listening to recordings of saxophonist Sidney Bechet, the poet’s favorite jazz musician.

On this particular occasion, they have decided to meet in Hull--a device to get them into Larkin’s framework, which is represented by a semi-realistic setting of sepulchral white. And while the four are talking of him and of other poets, the gray-suited Larkin suddenly appears.

First staged at the Edinborough Festival, “Sweet Sorrow” ran for three weeks in August as a Fringe event and received mixed to rave reviews. It then played for five weeks in Hull, where Godber’s company stages from six to 12 productions a year in a 200-seat theater on an annual budget of $300,000.

The Irvine Barclay engagement, which is the U.S. premiere for “Sweet Sorrow,” follows a weeklong run in London where the play was performed as part of a “Pick of the Fringe” festival along with eight other productions that appeared at Edinborough.

Notwithstanding its introspective subject, Godber maintains that the staging “is certainly within my style of direction” and

bears a conceptual similarity to previous plays of his own that have been seen in Los Angeles.

Like “Bouncers” and the less successful “Shakers”--both directed by Ron Link here (but by Godber in England)--”Sweet Sorrow” depends on the kaleidscopic idea of a handful of actors depicting a multitude of roles. “Sweet Sorrow” has five doing more than two dozen.

“There’s no putting on of hats and pretending to be somebody else,” Godber said. “They acquire different personalities by doing it essentially, from moment to moment through a strong sense of gesture. It’s not through costuming or designing or funny voices. We try to keep away from the funny voices.”

“Sweet Sorrow” by Alan Plater opens Wednesday at 8 p.m. at the Irvine Barclay Theatre where it will run for seven performances, through Sunday, Oct. 21. The theater is at 4242 Campus Drive, Irvine. Tickets: $19 to $28. Information: (714) 854-4646.