Viv Hardwick talks to playwright/director Conor McPherson about The Seafarer, which is playing Newcastle's Theatre Royal and to actor Bob Kingdom, who is touring the region with tributes to Dylan Thomas and Truman Capote.

AWARD-winning playwright and director Conor McPherson discovered that a stage comedy-drama featuring a character who has to play poker for his soul against the devil wasn't quite as simple to act out as he first thought.

"It's based on an old Irish myth of the devil arriving to play cards and gave me the idea for the story," he says of The Seafarer which comes direct from the National Theatre on tour to Newcastle Theatre Royal this week.

"The poker match was a nightmare but then writing the game was really hard and when we got to rehearsing and none of the cast has ever really played before. They had to learn the rules and then started to point out all the inaccuracies in the text. It took ages and ages and just one line dropped meant the whole thing collapsed," he explains. As a result the cast runs through the poker match before each performance to avoid mistakes.

McPherson, 35, has enjoyed stage and screen success since he created the play The Weir which, like all his work, is set in contemporary Ireland and is dominated by older male characters. Now he feels he'd like to 'explore the feminine side of his psyche'.

"Its been very easy for me to write about guys because as a man I understand how men think but, yeah, I think writing about women is a territory that I would be careful about because I'd want to do it truthfully and not just to notch up another play."

Sinead Cusack, Penelope Wilton and Miranda Richardson are the kind of actresses he has in mind but he admits that putting words in the mouths of women might be a mountain too high for him. "I am one of these people who think that men and women are wired differently and I think that might be an interesting thing to explore," McPherson says.

The project is almost certain to be set in a current-day Ireland because McPherson claims "this is a door that opens easily through which the energy can flow. Whenever I think of other countries and other times it puts up obstacles to my self-confidence and make me back away."

Even so, the modest writer used the title and content of an Anglo-Saxon poem to add to the ageless legend of the Hellfire Club and the devil.

"I thought if you're going to put the devil on stage as a character he's such an isolated individual because his very existence is hatred and separation. I considered this person to be very lonely and that gave me a way in and reminded me of the poem about a guy being alone at sea. Then I thought how unjust it was. If you have a devil then you have a God and he has created the devil, who would feel hard done by," he says.

* The Seafarer runs until Saturday at Newcastle's Theatre Royal. Box Office: 0870-905-5060

BOB Kingdom is a man in a suitcase when it comes to performing. The Welsh actor says he travels with one item of luggage and out pops his reincarnation of fellow countryman Dylan Thomas or acerbic US writer Truman Capote - the subject of two recent films.

Both his creations will be seen at Richmond's GeorgianTheatre Royal in the next two months and Scarborough's Stephen Joseph Theatre has booked two nights of Capote in June.

So where do you start with tributes to such well-known literary figures? "If I know I can do the voice and look like them then that's the starting point. I wouldn't attempt to do anybody that was not within my range.

"With Dylan, he's a local hero in Wales and I remember hearing his voice on the radio before my own voice broke and I thought he sounded amazing and just thought it would be wonderful to be able to do that. You start messing around in pubs and parties and do a bit of your Dylan and then you think' maybe there's something in this'. Then you have those words and that voice, which are very much entwined," says Kingdom who was nine when Dylan Thomas died following his tragic binge drinking session at New York's White Horse Pub in 1953.

"I'd like to have met him when he was sober... any fool can get pissed, it's not particularly clever and it's sad when you compare the two of them because drink is the ultimate destroyer. Dylan and Truman died of words. Dylan said he'd die of hospitality and performing and he did. Truman wrote this stuff about his friends and thought he was a genius and capturing them in words would make them flattered, but they weren't.

"He was very indiscreet and they cut him out of their lives and that hastened his demise."

Kingdom's portrayal of Capote, who died in 1984, won an award at the Edinburgh Festival. "As an actor I would be cynical not to be grateful for working because there are so many out of work and these are things I can take off the shelf, dust down and do again and a lot of other people say they wish they had a one man show like them," says Kingdom, who captured the attention of acting legend Sir Antony Hopkins as director of the Dylan Thomas show.

"The main thing he said was I had to be Dylan Thomas and not a prissy actor wanting to please and he wrote 'I'm a genuis, my brain is on fire. You're about to see something extraordinary... and if you don't like it you can **** off'," he laughs.

* Bob Kingdom performs Dylan at Richmond's Georgian Theatre Royal on Saturday and Truman on May 19. Box Office: 01748-825252

l Truman is at the Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough, on June 19-20. Box Office: 01723-37054