Pauline McLynn swaps tea lady Mrs Doyle for chippie boss's wife Mrs Khan in East Is East

Move over her British Comedy Award-winning turn as indomitable tea lady Mrs Doyle in Graham Linehan's Channel 4 Irish comedy, and her later television roles as Libby Croker in the north western grime of Shameless and now Yvonne Cotton in the South London soap EastEnders.

Pauline is heading for the Grand Opera House in York next month as family matriarch Ella Khan in Sam Yates's 14-week national tour of Ayub Khan Din’s East Is East, an East meets West story best remembered for Damien O'Donnell's 1999 film version. It's the one where Pakistani chip shop owner George Khan – "Genghis" to his children – is determined to give them a strict Muslim upbringing in 1970s Salford. Household tension reaches breaking point as their long-suffering English mother, McLynn's Ella, is caught in the crossfire, her loyalties divided between her marriage and the free will of her children.

"It's just a delight to be going around and about on tour," says the Irish actress, whose role in the show began in early June. "I'm a little bit daunted because I keep falling in love with everywhere we go." York will surely by no different.

Her role in East Is East is at the very heart of Ayub Khan Din’s semi-autobiographical account of British Asian life in the 1970s and the clash of cultures between a multi-cultural family growing up in Salford. "I did see the film when it came out in the mid-1990s, though I remembered very little except that I'd laughed like a drain at all the bad behaviour of the Khan family and the Shahs.

"The play had come first, of course, and though there's the DVD of the film that I could have watched before rehearsals, I thought, 'No, I don't want to make comparisons with it', though a lot of people have come to the show having seen the film."

Pauline has performed in the plays of Shakespeare and Sophocles, Beckett and Brecht, and she ranks East Is East very highly. "It's well regarded as a modern classic, and the reason is the storytelling. Audiences laugh at certain times, but they also gasp at certain times, like when one of the kids is badly beaten, but the reaction at the end is joyous," she says. "People are loving some bits of it, shocked by some bits and relieved at how it ends.

"I think what a lot of people see in this play is they recognise the very rough and ready, rough and tumble families, where you can say anything to anyone in your family and you have to fit in with that somehow. We've all been there, where we've said the worst of things and moved on."

Pauline McLynn. Picture: Jeff Gilbert

Watching such family frictions live on stage adds a frisson, suggests Pauline. "When you see a performance live, you can be shocked and excited by it; you'll feel you've got your money's worth there, and of course there's a different reaction ever night, which is the joy of theatre," she says. "Sometimes too, if people remember you in a live performance, the performance grows in the re-telling."

Assessing the character of Ella, who continually risks the wrath of her husband, Pauline says: "You might think she's a stereotype, but she's archetypal. That's the mask of good writing. It's all there in a nutshell in the writing. It's all there in this character. What I love about this play is that it doesn't outstay its welcome; it's two hours in total, so it's perfectly formed. It's a nugget. It's a gem.

"One of the odd things for women in theatre is there aren't many fantastic roles for women of a certain age, but this is one of them because it tells a great story. We get to a crisis point in Ella's relationship where she has to protect and look after her kids, but it's open ended, so who knows where it will go next."

The 1970s' setting brings its own challenges. "I've got a lot of polyester to wear, so it all gets rather sweaty," says Pauline. "They were very brown and dark times, the Seventies, in their fashions and there were all these nylon sheets. The youngest son's parka is made of nylon, and he gets so hot sometimes, you have to fan him down."

Pauline McLynn as Ella Khan in East Is East. Picture: Marc Brenner

Pauline will savour the role of Ella to the tour's end, but what comes next? "What I love about the whole mad journey of it all as an actress is that here I am, on a long tour of the UK, and once it finishes in September, who knows what will happen. It's one of the things I've grown used to and I'm calm about," says the 53-year-old Sligo actress and author. "There are seven men's parts to one woman's part in this profession."

Maybe EastEnders might beckon again? "Yvonne's not dead. She's in exile. She's behaved very badly," says Pauline. "I kind of like being on the edge of coming back, waiting to hear...I love EastEnders; it's my favourite soap; I love the misery."

Away from the stage, Pauline is a regularly published author, with such titles as The Woman On The Bus, Better Than A Rest and Something For The Weekend. "But the writing never happens when I have free time," she says. "I'm always writing when I'm trekking around the UK. One feeds off the other, and it's really interesting doing that, performing great stories and paying homage to them in my own way by writing."

Good writing means everything to Pauline. "That's what made Father Ted so good," she says. "It was just so stupidly funny."

East Is East, Grand Opera House, York, August 3 to 8, 7.30pm plus 2.30pm Wednesday and Saturday matinees. Box office: 0844 871 3024 or at atgtickets.com/york