Provocatively yours

Two years ago, Rachel O'Riordan could never have imagined she would be flying to New York this week to oversee the Broadway transfer of Hurricane, the first play she ever directed.

A one-man show about snooker player Alex Higgins, written by and starring O'Riordan's husband Richard Dormer, the play has been a smash hit up and down the country ever since it first stumbled modestly into a small Belfast theatre.

'We originally planned it to run for ten days,' says O'Riordan. 'Now it's had two West End runs and opens in America this week.'

Determining precisely what made Hurricane such a runaway success is impossible and O'Riordan has consciously resisted trying. Instead, she's been pouring her energies into her second production, Protestants, which also opens this week and is about as different from Hurricane as it gets.

It too is a oneman show (starring Paul Hickey) but rather than telling one story about one man, it tells many stories about many people - from Elizabeth I to Oliver Cromwell to a Rangers thug. All, in some form or another, are Protestant; the play ambitiously examines what it truly means to be Protestant beyond rigid Orangemen stereotypes.

This may sound rather dry compared with Hurricane's torrid real-life drama but in Belfast it sparked a reaction even O'Riordan hadn't anticipated. 'To put the word Protestants on a poster in Belfast is a very cocky thing to do,' she says.

'We meant to provoke but certainly not to insult and yet everyone came to see it with very firm, different ideas of what being Protestant meant. We held several heated post-show discussions.

'It says something that we could put it on at all - 15 years ago it wouldn't have been possible.'

O'Riordan describes herself as a 'Southern Taig' - she comes from Cork - but as a Belfast outsider she was well-placed to observe the city's fraught religious identity. 'There's a general feeling in Belfast that they are missing out on a cultural heritage,' she says.

'Catholicism is full of song and dance, strife and pageant, it draws on rebellion and the Celtic tradition. Many Protestants consider their culture to be less defined; less rich and more domestic. And yet it has an amazing history. It changed the world, for a start.'

O'Riordan trained as a dancer - her fluent, physical style was partly what made Hurricane so captivating - and set up Ransom Productions two years ago when her desire to direct theatre overwhelmed her.