EDINBURGH FESTIVAL '98: The accidental director

After Blasted, is Sarah Kane's new play in good hands? Just ask the revitalised Paines Plough company.

"PEOPLE SAY to me, `you've come from nowhere in a year', but I didn't. They just weren't listening. Or I wasn't showing them." Vicky Featherstone is on a high.

After her award-winning production of the false-memory syndrome drama Anna Weiss at last year's Festival, she's back at the Traverse with Crave, the startlingly elegant new play by theatre's so-called "bad girl", Sarah Kane. What's more, she's doing it as artistic director of the reborn Paines Plough, one of this country's most enduring and well-respected companies. Not bad, considering she's just 31 years old.

To get this far this fast, she must have been directing since the year dot. Not quite. While she was doing an English and drama degree at Manchester, a friend asked her to direct a play he'd written for his dissertation. "I'd wanted to be an actor, but it had never sat right with me. I was adequate but not good. But when I directed this play it was peculiar. I hadn't realised that was what I'd wanted to do, but as soon as I found myself doing it, everything in my life up to that point came into play. All my personal skills and my belief in theatre came together."

And that was that. After completing an MA in direction she wrote to everyone under the sun for a job. Met by a deafening silence, she took a production to the Edinburgh fringe. Its success led to stints on the assistant director circuit. She grins. "I learned a lot, sometimes in spite of people." She refuses to name names but talks of directors walking into rehearsals with clear-cut processes that they applied to everything. "I think it's fear. They're not open to anything. Surely, the question is how to find a way to work on this together? As an assistant, I've had really fine actors crying on my shoulder saying `I really don't understand this play' because of the way a director has worked, not allowing his actors to own the play. It's just lines, lines, lines."

The next few years at the West Yorkshire Playhouse and the Bolton Octagon taught her another lesson. She realised that the uncovering of a classic - the way that most directors make their reputations - didn't really interest her. Instead, she was drawn to the stimulation of working in the more unknown territory of new writing. In common with the Traverse's director, Philip Howard, she believes that a writer's vision is more interesting than a director's. "Friends would say, `Oh, I've just found the way to do Calderon's Life is a Dream', or whatever. I just don't read plays and think about them like that."

What she didn't realise was that this amounted to a directorial vision. "It's to do with a fascination with writers and writing. And it's not going to run out on me, because it's not about me, it's about them."

With at least 10 full-scale productions under her belt, she turned down work to come to London to pursue this. But another letter-writing campaign yielded nothing until Dominic Dromgoole of The Bush rang her saying, "I suppose you think you're good? You'd better come in and meet me." He took her on as temporary literary manager but she leapfrogged sideways into TV as a script editor.

"It was a mistake. It paid well, but I went to bed every night feeling a complete and utter fraud. At 27 I'd sold out on the dream I hadn't even tried. People told me I could do theatre at the same time, but it was no good. I wanted to work properly with writers." Then, last February, the Paines Plough job came up and she became The Woman Who Gave Up TV. She was making a serious career, having come up with the hit series Where The Heart Is, and Touching Evil with Robson Green. Yet she describes leaving as "an unbelievable release".

At Paines Plough, she smartly brought in hot new writers, including Kane and Mark Shopping and Fucking Ravenhill. He co-wrote her first show, Sleeping Around, and despite the notorious difficulty of selling new writing, it played 70 per cent business around the country.

Her taste in writers is fairly tough-minded. "I do believe that an important theme and good dialogue are not enough." She talks of her attraction to plays with an image at the centre, such as the Scots playwright David Greig's The Architect, which, unfathomably, has never played London. "Those plays are really hard to get right because the image can seem overblown or feel irrelevant. It's much easier to think up a good story and just put it on stage. Stories are important, but I want more stimulation for the audience."

That attachment to imagery makes Featherstone an ideal match for Sarah Kane. "Watching a piece of theatre is like being on a swing. Your relationship to the characters is constantly changing. It's not like reading a novel, where the perspective is fixed. That's what I'm trying to do with Crave. In another play, you get the sense that the characters will carry on regardless of you being there. Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman will be selling whether we're there or not. In Crave, the characters exist through speaking."

The hallmark of her direction is a spectacularly shrewd ear for detail and the truthful trajectory of the characters: "When you hear music you have one initial feeling about it. That's what happens when I read a play. I really try to hold on to that feeling and then try to place all my ideas around it. It's an instinctive thing. It parallels what an audience experiences. They only get one shot at it."

`Crave' opens tonight at the Traverse (0131-228 1404)