BETWEEN performances of East is East, Pauline McLynn breezes into the interview and embarks immediately on the conversation, as if we were old mates meeting for a coffee and a chinwag.

The warmth of her greeting recalls the first rays of the sun emerging from the clouds and we are plunged instantly into a chat that rattles along like an express train for the next forty-five minutes.

Needless to say, Pauline is not short of a witty line and even if she hadn’t spent most of her professional life hanging out with assorted laughter-makers, she’d still be a funny woman, ready with a wisecrack or a droll turn of phrase.

Her theatre credits include such heavyweight writers as Shakespeare and Sophocles, Beckett and Brecht but she is never far from the comedic, whether on stage, on screen or when she is immersed in her own writing – she is the author of eight books. Not that there were too many laughs, except of a bitter variety, with her two recent stints on television, tangling with David Threlfall in Shameless and then menacing one of the great ladies of EastEnders.

“I got off the bus last week and a woman came up to me and told me that she didn’t like what I’d done to Dot!”

After a lengthy absence from the stage, Pauline recently appeared at Shakespeare’s Globe in The Knight of the Burning Pestle in which she and Phil Daniels, as her husband, spent much of the time sitting with the audience in a bizarre play that bursts through the fourth wall and most other theatrical conventions. It was an experience which Pauline relished.

“It was really wonderful,” she enthuses. “And I was very pleased to be playing a London woman. In the same way, I’m delighted to be cast in East is East, playing a lady from Salford, although she is of Irish extraction, or so we have decided. I’m getting a chance to show a bit of versatility. I like to play lots of different characters and not do the Irish thing all the time, much as I love it.”

The lady from Salford Pauline mentions is Ella, the long-suffering wife and mother in East is East, Ayub Khan Din’s hilarious domestic comedy.

“I hadn’t seen the play on stage - either the original production or this revival when it played in the West End. However, I do remember seeing the film, although I don’t recall much of the detail, other than the very funny scene towards the end when everybody behaves very badly.”

What drew Pauline to the character?

“It’s such a great part for a woman of a certain age and there are not many of these about. I think that the ratio of male roles to female roles is about seven to one! I also wanted to work with Sam Yates, the director of this production. I hadn’t met him but I heard that he was a hot property which interested me. I also think that East is East is a great show, a brilliantly well-made play which gives the audience a great night out. There are plenty of laughs but there are also moments when the audience will gasp at what they see. It’s very much an emotional roller-coaster for those who come to the show and they certainly get plenty of bang for their buck.”

Pauline argues that the play deals with issues which are as old as human society itself.

“Everybody who has grown up in a family will recognise the rough-and-tumble of home life which East is East captures so well. It shows us the tensions that exist whenever a group of people, families or non-families are thrown together and you see the bad behaviour which results. Take my two younger brothers. They still treat me as if I were the family eejit and they were still calling me names such as hook-nose and verruca-head. But you can say such terrible, cruel things to your siblings because you’re all part of the same family.”

There is a strong autobiographical element in the play and so we are probably correct to assume that there is a good deal of Ayub Khan Din’s late mother in the character of Ella.

“I understand that Ayub’s parents met while Ella was working as a conductress on the buses. I gather that he wore her down by his determination to marry her but there was an enormous mutual attraction between them. I can think of one of my friends, who was no child bride and who married relatively late in life. She felt something similar – that the power of the mutual attraction could not be dismissed.”

The play is set in the early 1970s, an important time for the immigrant community for a number of reasons.

“I think they must have been one of the few Asian families to settle in Salford,” remarks Pauline. “Most people arriving from Pakistan would have made for Yorkshire and towns such as Bradford. Mixed marriages were very unusual and I understand that Ayub’s mother suffered a lot of racist and sexist abuse because she’d married a Pakistani. People would call her a whore as they passed her in the street. It is also the time when multi-culturalism was beginning to have an impact in Britain and we are still exploring the consequences of that development today.”

It was also during this period that Pakistan was defeated in a war with the country that is now known as Bangladesh but which had been previously been part of the state of Pakistan. Pauline wonders if the loss of East Pakistan did not make George re-assess his life.

“He is a proud man,” Pauline points out. “And he has also reached the age when your roots, where you come from, become more important to you. Perhaps this is why he insists on the family following the traditional customs and agreeing to an arranged marriage. The children are beginning to leave home because of the pressure and Ella is fighting to keep the family together. But she is pulled in two directions - between her love for her husband and her maternal love for her children. Ella eventually decides to make a stand, an act that has brutal consequences. The play ends with unresolved problems still to be faced.”

Pauline admires the structure of the play, considering that “the autobiographical element is used brilliantly and you’re carried along in the narrative. One of the reasons why Ireland has produced so many great playwrights is due to the strength of the story-telling tradition in Irish culture. In many ways it is more of a spoken than a written culture and Ayub understands that tradition. He is a story-teller.”

Pauline first broke through to a wider audience due to the success of Father Ted in which she played the unforgettable Mrs. Doyle, the unhinged housekeeper to a trio of eccentric priests.

“Oddly enough I seem to be going backwards in time as far as the characters I play are concerned - from the old crones like Mrs Doyle to Ella, who is a mere forty-six. I’m aging down to play her and isn’t that lovely!”

What makes Pauline chuckle?

“I’ll often laugh at things in a script which nobody else finds funny and you can never tell what will make an audience break up. Sometimes they laugh at what you could say is an inappropriate moment but I say, let them laugh. I don’t think that there is such a thing as an inappropriate moment. Look at the Russians - they often laugh when they are at their most miserable. Recently on television I loved watching W1A and I couldn’t love the BBC more for commissioning the series in the first place.”

Pauline is looking forward to enjoying some downtime moments on the tour and she intends to use her moments of leisure by exploring some of the countryside close to where East is East will be playing.

“I love visiting graveyards” she reveals. “I love to look at the inscriptions on the gravestones. They are places of great calm and I love that.”

Al Senter