When Jackie met Julie

Once every blue moon, a journalist is born interesting enough to write a whole play about. Jeffrey Bernard did it with his manful dedication to drinking both his legs off. Julie Burchill is a differently coloured horse, famous not for anything so pass? as liking a drop (though she does like a drop), but rather for the sheer reach of her opinion. She is often accused of writing to provoke, because nobody can quite believe that one human could house so much trenchant belief, so much fearless 'tude.

Burchill herself insists that the most curious thing about her is her heart of stone. She gestures at her bright pink sitting-room with its gold cornicing, as if that were proof. 'Of course, there are layers to me,' she says. 'It would be sad if everything was out in the open. But imagine if what was underneath was even harder and nastier than that on top.' The image of a woman made of purest iron filings, who sees other people as 'nothing but tables and chairs' is generated by Burchill - and kept alive by her wit.

True cruelty, after all, is not dissing people, but dissing them so amusingly that they stay dissed for the rest of their lives. And I still remember Burchill's description of Camille Paglia: 'The G is silent - about the only thing about her that is.' Everyone knows that her former husband, and fellow journalist, Tony Parsons is God's (other) curse to women - not on evidence, but because of Julie Burchill, whose descriptions of him are so callous that they stick to him like burr. 'He resembles nothing so much as an old, sick, balding rhesus monkey,' she said recently.

You wouldn't have to be Tony Parsons to experience a frisson of anxiety at the prospect of a one-woman play based entirely on Julie Burchill's columns.

Indeed, you wouldn't even have to be famous to come in for a lampoon. You could just be German, American, male or - if you've had surgery, or an eating disorder - female ('They may be able to pull up their tights just by smiling,' she said of the face-lift posse, 'but they're never going to look like Kate Winslet wearing nothing but a necklace in Titanic.')

Not just anyone could play Julie Burchill. It will take a bit of a toughie, which is where Jackie Clune comes in. Clune has been huge in a fringe way for ages, but not massively mainstream (although she did have a part in EastEnders once). Stand-up-wise, she's best known for her relentless mockery of lesbians, which she could get away with because, a) she was one and b) because, she explains, 'Honestly, you can say "all lesbians are murderers", and they'll still cheer, because they're so pleased to get a mention.' Clune has a voice like all three Andrews sisters rolled into one, and a comic delivery to kill for.

The story of how she came to be playing Julie Burchill started a long time ago, Clune explains, her hair clashing vividly with her subject's sofa. 'I'd had a couple of girlfriends, and with both of them we had the same ritual. That I would read out Julie's column to them, on a Saturday morning - well, lesbian sex, you know. What else are you going to do in bed?' Then, last year, Clune was the support act for Puppetry Of The Penis, the Australian show where those two blokes do disgusting things with their privates.

Prolonged exposure to the antipodean penises had the odd effect of turning Clune straight, and she started going out with Tim Fountain, who'd just written a brilliant play about Quentin Crisp. Together, they had the idea for Julie Burchill Is Away, and then promptly split up, whereupon the project nearly died because Tim got custody of the idea. Joint care was finally established. 'I was annoyed at the time, though,' says Jackie, 'because it was reported in The Stage that I'd "landed the part", as if there had been people queuing round the block! When it had been half my idea in the first place!'

'Well, it's only natural for people to queue round the block to be me,' says Burchill, pensively.

Jackie, weirdly, is beginning to sound like Julie even when she's not acting. She says that she's doing it at home as well, and has had to warn her new boyfriend that she's basically going to be Burchill all the time, for the next two months.

Before Julie had seen the first rehearsal, Jackie had seemed maybe a tiny bit terrified. 'I would just hate you to think anything bad about what I was doing,' she says to Julie with, what I have to say, is utterly uncharacteristic meekness. 'I'm not like that,' Julie replies. 'You could never let me down.'