LOUISE Page's haunting drama Salonika is being given its first British staging in more than 20 years at the West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds.

"I got a phone call while I was walking along a street in the west of Ireland, in a town called Dingle, from Alex Chisholm at the Playhouse last Easter saying, 'Oh thank God, we've found you; are the rights available for Salonika?'.

I nearly fell off the pavement, which was very narrow!" recalls Louise.

"I've since discovered that it's artistic director Ian Brown's favourite play, so if it all goes horribly wrong, I can blame him."

Louise has resisted asking Ian why he is so fond of her long dormant play, which explores universal themes of love and loss and the fear of ageing alone in a Playhouse production directed by Nikolai Foster.

"It's one of those things that it's too private to go there; I've not heard Ian say it; it's just one of those things where people have said that's what he said about it, " she says.

Brown is not alone in his enthusiasm. "It's been done all over the world, much to my surprise, " says Louise, the London-born playwright, novelist and journalist who was raised in Sheffield and now lives in Derbyshire.

"I've seen productions in Japan; Australia; New York, at the Palace Theatre with Jessica Tandy in the cast - I think she was in her 80s, and she was incredibly elegant. "Then there was a very strange production in Germany, where they set it in a womb, and they didn't tell me that until I saw it, and they'd left me waiting for two hours at the airport because they said I didn't look like the writer of this play."

The National Theatre of Greece, where the play is set, has staged the play too, but not since a production in Lancaster has anywhere in England presented Page's tale of 63-year-old Enid and her 84-yearold mother Charlotte on holiday.

"I just think there's been a long time when my work has not been fashionable, " Louise says.

"There's been 15 years of very voyeuristic, very violent theatre, but they are fantastic writers, and it's just been a different audience to when I was a young playwright.

They all want to be the new Martin Scorsese; they all want their plays to be very violent, but won't we become bored with that? That's what I think."

  • Salonika, West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds, until February 16. Box office: 0113 213 7700.