Butler at your service. Since 2000, Alan Ayckbourn has cast Saskia Butler in no fewer than seven of his plays.

It began with three roles - evil cousin, a woman in a wartime Tube station, a child in a bubble in the future - in the musical Whenever at the Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough.

After Whenever, it's been a case of whatever, wherever, with roles on the East Coast and in the West End (in a six-month run of Ayckbourn's Damsels In Distress trilogy).

From this week to January 3, Saskia is playing the title role in Ayckbourn's new family drama, My Sister Sadie, at Scarborough.

In this tender tale, a family's life on a run-down, isolated English farm is changed for ever by the arrival of the strangest of strangers, Sadie. Who is she, Saskia?

"Well, Sadie is a survivor from a helicopter crash in the countryside, and though I can't say exactly who she is, she is very different. She's not your ordinary girl," she says.

Is she human? An alien? A robot maybe? "Sadie is definitely more IT information technology than ET, but she has personality and soul and she finds herself a brother - and I think that if there's one theme to take away from this play, it's the age-old story of love conquering over evil," Saskia says.

She enjoys performing Ayckbourn's family stories as much as his disturbing adult works, such as this autumn's revival of Way Upstream.

"The great thing about his children's shows is that he can really go into a fantastical world, where he can't go in his adult plays. Maybe an adult audience likes a more literal story to relate to the characters and what happens to them, whereas in My Sister Sadie, a child's imagination can run wild," she says.

"As an actress, I love theatre, I love cinema, because it's wonderful when a play or a film takes you out of yourself for two hours."

A new play gives Saskia a chance to mint a new role.

"It's always a good feeling to know your name will be in the original cast list and will go down in a little piece of theatre history," she says. "You know you're creating a new character, and you're not thinking, like I was with Way Upstream, 'my god I wonder how the role was played before?'.

"But then Alan Ayckbourn always says he never mentions what an actor did the previous time and he reckons that 80 per cent of a performance comes down the cast and the way they do it."

Sadie will be a joy to play. "There's an honesty about her because she's very literal. She doesn't understand irony; she doesn't get jokes; she can't fathom metaphors," says Saskia. "So that provides lots of comedy and a lot of warmth to her because she's so open."

Can't wait to meet My Sister Sadie, whoever she is.

For tickets, ring 01723 370541.

Updated: 16:23 Thursday, December 04, 2003