NEVER forget a face or a name. Or maybe make sure you have an unforgettable name, like Lucy Pitman-Wallace. This autumn season, Lucy is the assistant director for the repertory series of three plays in the main auditorium at York Theatre Royal, a role that finds her renewing a working partnership with artistic director Damian Cruden after eight years.

"I was at the Bristol Old Vic theatre school in 1992-93 studying directing, and as part of the course I was sent - voluntarily, I stress - to Hull Truck Theatre," she recalls. "I thought I was going to be working with John Godber, but it turned out to be Damian! He was doing a season of three overlapping shows, just as we are now."

Damian and Lucy made their re-acquaintance when actor Matthew Rixon invited her to see Cruden's spring production of Kafka's Dick.

"Matthew said he had this lovely acting job in York working for Damian, and did I want to see it? Well, I met Damian and he asked me if I'd be interested in doing a project like the one we did in Hull, and I said 'Yes' there and then."

Never mind that it might have been politic to have checked first with her agent over her availability. Lucy was that keen to work with Damian once more. "There were many things that I learnt from him in Hull, and he even came down on a Sunday to see a play I was directing in Bristol, which was an amazing thing for him to do," she says.

"He has always maintained an interest in the progress of young people he's worked with, and so we've picked up from where we left off."

In Hull, Lucy was "an observer, a student, an assistant director". This time, having chosen the autumn repertory company together with Damian, she is sharing the directing duties with him for Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream; taking the wheel for David Hare's The Blue Room, with Damian in the crow's nest, and reversing the roles for Christopher Hampton's Les Liaisons Dangereuses. What's more, all three productions are being worked into shape at the same time.

There is no significance in Damian's name being billed first in the credits for A Midsummer Night's Dream. "We just decided to do it alphabetically. We're literally directing side by side, and it works very well because we have very different styles," says Lucy.

"Damian is very good visually, and at knowing where people should be on stage, and at seeing how music can fit in. My specialism is detail: the characterisation; the relationships; why are you doing what you're doing at a particular moment in a scene?"

How has the directing partnership progressed so far? "When we first started rehearsals for 'Midsummer', we had a system where one would lead and the other would contribute. To begin with, the lovers were my patch, and the rude mechanicals were his, but as we've developed and become more confident, we can pass the ball between each other, although there's always the sense that someone is holding the ball at a particular time.

"What we didn't want was rows and two people giving contradictory direction but whether it's luck or not, I do think we have a shared vision. There are moments when Damian will say something I was just about to say." Telepathy rules.

Lucy Pitman-Wallace - who incidentally is the great grand-daughter of the inventor of the Pitman shorthand writing system - is "really enjoying" her time at York Theatre Royal. "There's great pleasure in seeing 12 actors working on three sets of material. You have that wonderful thing of watching them being stretched and calling on different skills for different parts, and you gain time in later rehearsals because all that funny, introductory stuff of getting to know each other is quickly out of the way," she says. "That's particularly useful in The Blue Room which could be so self conscious because of the nudity."

Tonight is opening night for A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Lucy can't wait for the 7.30pm start.

"There's something very special about old wedding-cake theatres," she says. "The Theatre Royal is one of the few theatres where you walk in and see the stage and auditorium for the first time and the hairs stand up on the back of your neck."

A Midsummer Night's Dream opens at York Theatre Royal tonight; Les Liaisons Dangereuses on October 6; The Blue Room, October 11; the three then run in repertoire until November 17. Box office: 01904 623568.