DERVLA Kirwan, the Irish screen star of Hearts And Bones and Ballykissangel, hasn't acted on stage for so long she can't remember in which play she last appeared.

However, she is treading the boards once more after a seven-year gap, appearing for the first time at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds in Laurie Sansom's revival of J B Priestley's time play Dangerous Corner.

"I've turned down two massive TV pieces to do this, and that's scary, but I really wanted to work with the Playhouse," says Dervla, 30, who will be heading to the West End in the role of Olwen Peel, part of a young, beautiful group of It People caught up in the big money and ego-flexing of a transatlantic publishing company.

Dervla had started in theatre in her teens, appearing in A Handful Of Stars at The Bush in London at 16, but television took over, and she went on to win Most Popular Actress at the National Television Awards in 1996.

Yet you sense her frustration at the limitation of television. "In general, I don't watch a lot of TV - and I'm in the business," she says. "There seems to be this attitude that if you dumb down TV, people won't notice but they do notice, and they hanker after good drama."

Dervla had that hankering too, hence her decision to renew her theatre aspirations. "I think now is the time to do it. I was approached to do this play, and the main thing is that I've never really been content to settle for an easy life in my career," she says.

She will counter any suggestion that television work is easy -"I would film for 15 hours a day", she says - but she has enjoyed reacquainting herself with the working environment of the theatre. "There is a buzz about it, and there's the continuity and the luxury of working together on something for five weeks, and not just going home to learn your lines for the next day's shoot.

"Writers such as Priestley spent all their lives sculpting their scripts so that every word was a jewel and the actor's job is to find a modern truth with a modern delivery," Dervla says.

She knows that her television fame cuts both ways: on the one hand, the invitation to appear as the "workaholic, bright, creative, academic, truth-seeking" Olwen Peel; on the other, a closer scrutiny of her performance than might be afforded to lesser-known actresses. "The pressures are on, because people are thinking 'Can Kirwan hack it, and if she can, is she any good?', and I like that challenge. I'm getting my rocks off on this play."

So much so, she plans to do more stage work. "I'd love to work with the great directors; work at the National; work with Alan Ayckbourn at Scarborough. I'd like to do a play a year... telly and a play a year."

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