Original sinner

When O'Brien met Gebler, he was married, a Communist and nearly twice her age. Needless to say, her parents (who were sent poison pen letters by disapproving locals) did not approve and the couple eloped to London, marrying in 1954. A decade later they divorced amid a messy custody battle for their two sons, Carlo and Sacha, and Gebler's sour assertions that he was behind the success of his wife's books. "The fact that my star, my little star, was rising, made him very angry," O'Brien admitted recently. "I think for writers - maybe for actors as well - marrying isn't the best idea."

O'Brien's love affair with the theatre has been more enduring, going back to her school days and the annual visits of the travelling players. "They did melodramas and the lighting was a row of paraffin lamps across the front of the stage but to me it was Stratford-upon-Avon or better," she recalls. "I had nothing to judge it by except that it was different from the fields and cows and horses and wild landscapes of County Clare. It was another world." In London in the swinging Sixties and Seventies she partied with Samuel Beckett (on one occasion, Carlo tested out his new palmistry book on the playwright, informing him that he had "a very thin artistic line"), and watched Peter O'Toole, Robert Shaw and Lotte Lenya working their magic on the stage.

Her first play, 1981's Virginia, based on the life and letters of Virginia Woolf and starring Maggie Smith, was followed by the family saga Our Father at the Almeida in 1999 and, in 2003, a version of Euripides' Iphigenia in Aulis. She writes the kind of plays she likes to watch. "I have a penchant for plays with no interval. I like plays that are around 85 to 90 minutes long (unless it's something profound like Shakespeare or Robert Lepage). A quick bullet - where what is omitted is equally understood, rather than going from A to B to C."

As our conversation draws to a close I wonder if O'Brien ever longs for the quiet life, an uncontroversial, non-priest-bating retirement from the quick bullets and white heat of writing? "They're all hell to write, I'll tell you that", she concedes, with a throaty chuckle. "But if it was easy, it would be a little bit boring."

'Triptych', to 10 May, Southwark Playhouse, London SE1 (0844 847 1656)

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