Tomorrow, Arts Council England is due to announce the grant that West Yorkshire Playhouse will be getting for the coming year.

Ian Brown, the theatre's artistic director, referred to the lateness of the announcement at a press preview of the Playhouse's spring and summer season.

"It makes it difficult to budget for a big organisation like this with a lot of people in it," he said.

The closure of two theatres including the Bristol Old Vic, and the threat hanging over The Priestley were, he said, indicative of hard times facing theatres.

"We are certainly ready for a fight, to make sure we don't lose any more theatres; but we don't know until December 14," he added.

Meanwhile the new season lies ahead. Among the new plays scheduled for the summer is Mela by Bradford writer Tajinder Singh Hayer.

Bradford's annual Mela in Peel Park is the setting for the play which explores the dynamics of friends and strangers as they come together during the weekend.

Tajinder said: "I was wandering around the Mela in 2005 thinking, If you can't write about this you can't write'. Three years later, I'd almost finished the play.

"The Mela is fascinating, you see people interacting in ways they don't usually do. It's also slightly scary, gangs of young lads roaming about.

"The play is inspired by my having grown up in Bradford. I saw the Mela as the perfect way of exploring the interaction of people. There is a need for the theatrical telling of these stories."

Last year Tajinder was selected to be part of London's Royal Court Theatre's 50 writers. His play If You Can't Stand the Heat is to be broadcast on BBC Radio 4. He is associate artist for Peshkar Productions and is currently working on a project in Oldham.

Bradford-born director Dominic Leclerc will be directing an adaptation of a 16th century book called Journey to the West which achieved cult status among world-wide television audiences in the 1970s for its special effects, Japanese actors and dubbed English soundtrack.

The version, adapted by Colin Teevan, was premiered at London's Young Vic in 2001. Put simply, the play is about an epic journey by a mythical character, Monkey, to the western heavens to collect the teachings of the Buddha and return them to China.

On the way he and three companions fight off evil attacks by multitudes of demons as they make their way over the Cliffs of Despair in pursuit of their holy destination.

The new staging directed by Dominic Leclerc, which begins in June has zany humour and spectacular visual displays including aerial acrobatics.

Other highlights include Sir Tom Stoppard's spy thriller Hapgood, a co-production with Birmingham Repertory Theatre starring the comic actress Josie Lawrence as the spy master Hapgood.

Director Rachel Kavanaugh said: "A lot of people think Stoppard is dry and unemotional. I don't agree with that. This is a play about double agents.

"The first scene consists of nothing but stage directions - people shoving suitcases under the doors of cubicles in a swimming pool. With the music I am sure it will be very funny.

"He also brings quantum physics into it - I don't say that to put you off. Hapgood is also a mother. There is a very moving scene when she visits her son at a rugby match."

The spring season gets underway with Year of the Rat by Roy Smiles - the author of the play about Spike Milligan, Ying Tong.

This is another biographical comedy drama. The subject is George Orwell towards the end of his life. In the shadow of the illness that will kill him and plagued by the need to finish his seminal novel 1984, Orwell battles with both literary and personal demons.

His attempts to win the heart and the hand of his editor colleague Sonia Bronwell are interrupted by the arrival of the witty but decadent depressive Cyril Connolly (author of Palinurus) and by brief appearances of animal characters from Animal Farm - the Rat, Napoleon the pig, and Boxer the honest and honourable shire horse.

Roy Smiles said: "The play is about the artistic process and loneliness. The comedy comes with the arrival of Cyril Connolly. The despair comes from Stalin's conquest of Eastern Europe. Stalin is represented by Napoleon.

"At school I read Orwell's essay The Lion and the Unicorn. I had a whale of a time doing the research and just fell in love with him all over again.

"Some people say Sonia Bronwell used Orwell. But she championed him until the day she died. She never made a penny out of 1984 and Animal Farm, which were best-sellers ross Europe. She was fleeced by a lawyer."

Other new productions include Ranjit Bolt's The Grouch, his second adaptation of Moliere's The Misanthrope; Northern Broadsides's Romeo and Juliet; The Yellow Doctress, a one-woman drama celebrating the life and work of Mary Seacole, the unsung heroine of the Crimean War; and Raymond Briggs's Fungus the Bogeyman.

Next year's Christmas and New Year family special will be the musical Peter Pan, a co-production with Birmingham Repertory Theatre based on J M Barrie's original huge stage hit. Tickets for this show go on sale as early as January 21.

  • For more information and tickets, the Playhouse's box office number is (0113) 2137700.