Thelma and Louise

Do you recognise this woman? If your reply is "I don't really know" - particularly if it is delivered in a wavering, nervous Manchester accent - you're dead right. This is Coronation Street's Mavis as you have never seen her before.

Thelma Barlow, who starred in the soap for 26 years, is not obvious casting for the role of Louise Brooks, the self-destructive silent screen star renowned for her sleek black bob. (In the 1920s, thousands of women adopted her look.) Barlow is to play Brooks on stage in the West End in Smoking with Lulu. The play finds an arthritic but sharp Brooks living in Rochester, New York, and is based on a real three-day interview for the New Yorker in 1978 by critic Kenneth Tynan (played uncannily by Peter Eyre). By the time of their encounter, Brooks had turned her back on Hollywood for some 40 years, having refused to kowtow to the studio system. The play is a meeting of two minds amid a deal of cigarette smoke - both were dying from emphysema.

The dialogue is fruity at times, something with which Mavis would not be comfortable. Nor indeed Barlow. But this is the kind of challenge she wanted when she left the Street five years ago. "I felt that if I really wanted do other things, it was time to go." More than once, she has been asked to return. "I would never say never, but it would have to be for something particularly interesting," she says.

Post-Mavis, her stage work has included Alan Bennett's Enjoy and Madame Arcati in Noel Coward's Blithe Spirit, both at Leeds, but it was TV that provided her next break, as the bossy, snobbish Dolly in the sitcom Dinnerladies, alongside Victoria Wood.

But the Street, it seems, won't be left behind. Even now, says Thelma, people still confuse her with her soap character and treat her as if she were a little bit simple.

"Mind you," she says conspiratorially, "that can be useful sometimes."

Smoking With Lulu