Lynne Parker has helped to make Rough Magic one of Ireland's leading theatre companies. But she's not resting on her laurels, she tells BelindaMcKeon.

Lynne Parker has a hold on her words. No matter how excitable the situation, they are not going to run away from her. In the frenzy of a lobby on opening night, in the heated debate at a theatre conference, hers is the pragmatic voice, hers the unruffled gaze.

Rough Magic, the company she and Declan Hughes formed in 1984, had a brilliant year in 2002, chiefly due to a memorable production at Project arts centre in Dublin of Michael Frayn's Copenhagen, for many the theatrical highlight of the year. But its seven nominations for Irish Times/ESB Irish Theatre Awards - and two wins, for best production and best set design - mean relatively little to Parker. "It's a great night out . . . and it certainly helps with the publicity," she says, "but you'd be crazy if you suddenly started thinking you'd cracked it."

Parker's refusal to take herself too seriously is the key to understanding her art, both as an acclaimed director and as one of the minds behind Rough Magic. The company has been a significant force from the outset: it was the first to bring international work, such as the plays of David Mamet and Caryl Churchill, to an Irish audience, and it quickly established itself as an impressive incubator for new Irish writing talent, staging the earliest works of Declan Hughes and Pom Boyd at the old Project. But Parker is unprecious about its origins, describing how she and Hughes simply needed something else to do once their four years of skipping lectures in favour of Players, the university drama group at Trinity College in Dublin, were up.

The more serious sides to that story are that, in the early 1980s, there was a dearth of opportunities for young people who wanted to work in theatre here and that the closed-shop policy of the larger theatres forced a proliferation of independent companies that would soon emerge as serious competitors to those theatres - but Parker likes the first version just as much. For all her reserve, there's a glint of devilment in her eye, and it shapes her vision of what a play should be. "I think most theatre is engendered at its root by a sense of mischief," she says. "If you lose that, you're going to get desperately earnest, and that's the killer."

So although the return of the now accomplished Hughes to the now established Project with his new play, Shiver, produced by the now renowned Rough Magic, represents a completion of a journey - from the exploratory to the urbane, perhaps: Hughes's debut, I Can't Get Started, was the first piece of new writing produced by the company at Project, in 1990 - Parker is more excited by what the work represents for Hughes than what it says about Rough Magic.

She has clearly been stirred by Shiver, a drama of two couples in post-boom Dublin, which she describes as "a play about society, because people are society". The play is a landmark for Hughes, she believes, coming at the end of a crucial period in his life. "Over the course of going through your 30s, things happen to you. He had children, his father died. You can't go through those 10 years and not change as a writer."

But the same period was a formative one for Rough Magic also. The tight ensemble of four actors (Hélène Montague, Anne Byrne, Stanley Townsend and Arthur Riordan) and two directors (Parker and Hughes) proved more difficult to maintain with the growth of the company's profile. Expense was certainly a factor. As twentysomethings turned into thirtysomethings, toiling for the love of the work or for a small share in the profit from a production became unrealistic.

But there was, too, an increasing sense of accountability. Rough Magic, aged 15, was no longer a flighty young thing that could get away with anything but a familiar presence on the Irish theatre scene, and further expansion and development needed to be structured rather than stumbled upon.

Professionalism and administrative control were nothing new to the company, Parker insists: Siobhán Bourke had been the administrator from the start, while the ethos of the old Project was to "get the show up on time and to the highest standard, to the standard of any theatre company in the city". But during a period of reflection and re-evaluation, the old co-operative approach was replaced by new structures of management. Bourke had left to work in film production and to set up Rough Magic Films (which is developing a short by Loughlin Deegan), and the actors pursued independent careers. And, for a time, the production of new work dried up. From outside, it looked suspiciously like a crisis.

But it was a necessary process, and one that reached a healthy conclusion, Parker insists, not one into which the company was forced by the funding criteria of the Arts Council. "In 1998, we had done The School For Scandal and The Whisperers" - Elizabeth Kuti's completion of A Trip To Bath, by Frances Sheridan - "and I realised we had done two 18th-century plays. And I realised that, though they were both good shows, the diversity we were known for wasn't evident in that choice. And that started us thinking. Needing to attract a new producer, that in itself, just drawing up the job spec, helped to define what we were. And what I felt very strongly was that we were only getting started. That there was absolutely a huge amount of stuff that we still had to achieve. That was the driving force."

Chief among the structural changes was the introduction of a new procedure for handling the monthly flood of new scripts. Deegan, also a playwright, was recruited as literary manager, and in 2001, in conjunction with Dublin Fringe Festival, the Seeds initiative was born. For the six young writers selected for commission from hundreds of submitted scripts, it was an invaluable opportunity: ongoing support from Deegan and Parker, participation in workshops and readings, the assistance of a mentor, chosen from a pool of renowned directors including Max Stafford-Clark and Philip Howard, and the production of their plays as works-in-progress at a festival at Project last year. Each of the six works has since received or will soon receive a full production, either on stage or as a radio play, and some of the participants have been recommissioned by Rough Magic.

The aim was to reduce the hit-or-miss aspect of securing major new writing talent. "Spontaneity has to have structures around it to support it, a method behind the madness," says Parker. "But luck still plays a huge part." And with founder members returning to write plays - besides Hughes's Shiver, a new work by Riordan is due for production soon - and the establishment of an artistic advisory panel made up of the company's original members and of other artists with long associations with Rough Magic, the old ensemble structure is alive in spirit if not in form. Parker knows, though, that this may be as easily attributed to the scale of Irish theatre as to anything else. "It's a very small pool here," she says. "People know each other."

But for many in the theatre community, this incidental ensemble, born less of initiative than of the fact that Irish working paths inevitably cross, is too tentative for comfort; as cuts ravage production budgets and anger escalates, the communication lines between companies, performers and funders seem more threatened than ever. Cracks are beginning to show in the theatre community.

Parker knows Rough Magic is fortunate, having been able to spend the latter half of last year developing Shiver and other work. For smaller companies, or companies on smaller grants, the luxury of devoting big chunks of time to the creative side of theatre is an impossibility; the administrative responsibilities of keeping offices open swallow too much of their budgets. And even the more successful have to make sacrifices in these straitened times.

The company is entering a frenetic period, with seven new pieces at various stagesof development, including two Seeds commissions, a piece of music theatre by Riordan and composers Bell Helicopter, new plays by Kuti, Gina Moxley and Oonagh Kearney, a piece by the Finnish playwright Laura Ruohonen and an adaptation with music of Yury Tynyanov's Lieutenant Kijé.

Parker has had to shelve a dream, however: the Rough Magic building, a new 300-seat theatre that would relieve the independent companies that weekly struggle for space, has been relegated to a long-term goal.

A trip to Sweden before Christmas gave Parker a glimpse of how greater Government generosity can benefit artists: higher grants, longer rehearsal times and more empowered practitioners render even low-budget pieces "spellbinding: all thought out, given time and intelligence". But she is adamant that simply complaining about the Arts Council is futile. She is a staunch defender, mentioning that it paid for her flight to Sweden with a Go See bursary and arguing that it is grossly understaffed, despite the recent controversial appointment of new staff. Nor does she sympathise with the view that the council's emphasis on administration is stifling artistic activity in Irish theatre, stressing that without Deborah Aydon, Rough Magic's executive producer, "the last three years would not have happened. The administrators are the ones who make things happen".

Parker sees that the problem goes beyond the Arts Council, back to the Government. And she knows about arguing with the Government for recognition for the arts, especially in difficult political and economic times. "You are always up against arguments like: 'Yes, but we have to fund health and education,' " she says. "But I believe that the arts are part of health and education, that it shouldn't be an either/or situation."

Praising the establishment of groups such as Associated Theatre Artists and the Theatre Forum, Parker is all for lobbying the Government, but, she says, it has to be done intelligently. Theatre people have to remember what they do best - then use their best skills to make progress. "The sector needs to use its imagination in the way it makes demands," she says. "There is no point in just moaning. What we're about principally is an engaging and entertaining art form. And there surely must be an entertaining and engaging way that we can address the lack of respect that the Government has shown to our sector."

Shiver opens at Project, Dublin, on Friday, running until April 19th, with previews today and tomorrow. Bookings at 01-8819613/4