Epic heart of darkness

'Sorry I'm late; it's not often you bump into Penelope Keith in the toilet, so I had to stop for a chat,' says Thea Sharrock, cheerily.

The Jerwood Space's rehearsal rooms in Southwark seem packed with famous theatrical faces the day we meet. And 31-year-old Sharrock, already with a pretty stellar directorial career under her belt - including directing Keith in Blithe Spirit and most recently the hysteria-inducing beast that was Equus with Daniel Radcliffe - could rightly count herself among them, except she's far too no-nonsense for that. Instead, she's focused on her latest daunting challenge: transferring a production first conceived for one of London's smallest stages on to one of its biggest.

In 2005, during her tenure as artistic director at Notting Hill's Gate Theatre, Sharrock directed The Emperor Jones, a largely forgotten, hour-long expressionist play by Eugene O'Neill from 1920.

It was one of the theatrical highlights of the year, due in no small part to the mesmerising lead performance by Paterson Joseph and an astonishing set, which made the audience of just under 70 a night peer down into something akin to a bear pit to see the action.

Now she's moving it, complete with Joseph (who she affectionately refers to as PJ), to the National Theatre's dauntingly vast Olivier stage.

'You can get as many in the audience in two nights at the Olivier as we could get in the whole run at the Gate,' she muses. 'We weren't allowed to change the seating layout but I'm quite glad, because it forced us to redesign the play for this stage. There was no way I could recapture the feelings of claustrophobia and involvement we had at the Gate and I think the biggest problem would have been if we'd tried.'

So is putting on such a big production at the National an ambition fulfilled? 'No, it's a dream come true,' she corrects, firmly, clearly still wary of the 'blonde ambition' remarks provoked by a seemingly rocket-propelled career that saw her become the first woman to win the prestigious JMK directing award (with her 2000 production of Caryl Churchill's Top Girls) and the youngest artistic director in the country when she took over at Southwark Playhouse aged 25.

But the steely determination that has got her where she is now is demonstrated in her choice of this play. Staging issues aside, The Emperor Jones is an uncompromising challenge. In Brutus Jones, O'Neill gives us a highly contentious tragic hero - an African-American escaped convict who has made himself emperor of an unnamed Caribbean island (clearly based on Haiti) and contemptuously refers to his subjects as bush n****rs.

We meet him at the moment of his downfall: voodoo drums beat in the hills and Jones is forced to flee through the forest - becoming a gibbering wreck as he encounters ghostly apparitions of his worst nightmares, from his own life and from a wider black history.

It's easy to come up with unpalatable readings of this play. There seems to be an inherent racism in the 'know your place' and 'reversion to type' messages and O'Neill's rendition of black Southern American speech is alarming. But as Sharrock points out, the cockney accent he gave sneering white trader Henry Smithers sounds odd to our 21st-century ears as well. And O'Neill made history when he premiered Jones by insisting the lead role was played by a black man, instead of a blacked-up white actor - the first time this had happened in the US.