SHEFFIELD, England — “Surely this isn’t the first time you’ve seen topiary snooker players?” asked the playwright Richard Bean with mock incredulity. Two figures, artfully shaped out of robust greenery, leaned, as if poised to pot a ball, on either side of the entrance to the Crucible Theater here.

Not only was it my first experience of snooker-shaped topiary, it was my first experience of snooker — a British version of pool, but, naturally, much more complicated. And my guide was Mr. Bean, whose play about snooker, “The Nap,” begins previews at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater on Sept. 5, produced by the Manhattan Theater Club and directed by Daniel Sullivan.

The Crucible usually offers theater of a more traditional sort. But each spring it is the thrumming home of the World Snooker Championship,which draws wall-to-wall television coverage from the BBC and generates obsessive interest here, with crowds gathering all over town to watch the live games on huge television screens set up in public places.

Mr. Bean, 62, the prolific British playwright who wrote “One Man, Two Guvnors,” “Great Britain,” “The Mentalists” and a string of other successful plays, knows the Crucible well, since with exquisite site-specific appropriateness, it was here that “The Nap” had its 2016 premiere. Before the start of the quarterfinal match we were to see, he threaded his way familiarly through the backstage corridors, transformed by huge posters of the players, nests of television cables and a press room full of journalists staring at screens and transmitting real-time results and match analysis.