This isn’t the disdainful aloofness of some theatrical grande dame

This isn’t the disdainful aloofness of some theatrical grande dame. In fact, when she finally accedes to my request to meet during rehearsals for Hotel, she’s thoughtful and generous and anxious to dispel any suggestion of frosty, lofty indifference. She apologises for seeming “difficult” but points out the absurdity of our meeting. “It’s an odd kind of conversation,” she muses, “there’s more going on than just two people in a room You’re doing your job.

It’s going to be read by a lot of people, and when it’s printed, it has a definitive quality which then gets quoted back at you 15 years later. It’s also not a conversation because it’s so one way…” And then, all of a sudden, the guarded nervousness gives way to laughter. “Never mind,” she says, the shutters opening to reveal a welcoming smile leaping across her face.She was an only child. Her father, a cartoonist, and her mother, a fashion model, moved from London to Montreal when she was 10, and she began writing short stories and producing living-room pantomimes. At 14, she wrote a full-length children and ponies book and was also improvising plays with a friend. “We would work out in some detail what was going to happen and we would play it, and, if we hadn’t quite liked how it went, we would play it again.” During her time at Oxford at the end of the Fifties, she won first prize at the National Student Drama Festival with her play Downstairs. Her first work to receive a professional production was The Ants, a radio play, a form which suited her because there was a market for it (and no fringe theatre in the early Sixties) and because she was raising her children.The (then) estimable theatre journal Plays and Players declared Light Shining in Buckinghamshire, in which different actors played the same character, to be “one of the finest pieces of English playwrighting for years”, but the big break came three years later in 1979 with Cloud Nine.

Like Light Shining, it was written for Max Stafford-Clark’s company Joint Stock and its dynamite cast (including Julie Covington, Antony Sher and Miriam Margolyes) who were wittily embracing gender-bending long before anyone dreamed of the term. Joint Stock pioneered a collaborative approach to playwriting, something which has had a marked effect on Churchill and scores of writers since. “It was very exhilarating because it was a completely different way of working.” Wasn’t it scary giving up authorial control? “Yes, a little bit, but there’s a misconception sometimes that the actual writing process becomes collaborative. Some companies create wholly devised plays but I’ve never gone that far into collaboration.” Joint Stock’s method was based on an extended workshop / research period, after which the writer would go away and write.