Director Peter Dineen's fascination with Frank O'Connor led him to work on a production of 'Mammy's Boy'. He tells Mary Leland about their similar Cork childhoods

Frank O'Connor once wrote a play called Time's Pocket, and there is an almost giddy sense of being caught in time's pocket as I watch a rehearsal of another play, Mammy's Boy, which the Everyman Palace Theatre in Cork has commissioned to celebrate the writer's centenary.

The first quivers of connection - or coincidence, or familiarity - that infuse this morning's encounter is the location of the rehearsal: South Presentation Convent, where I went to school. It is in Douglas Street, where the writer was born as Michael O'Donovan 100 years ago on September 17th, and where Cork City Council is refurbishing No 84, which may, according to his birth certificate, or may not, according to the postal directory for 1903, have been his birthplace. Next month it will become the headquarters of Munster Literature Society.

The second sense of familiarity comes from meeting Peter Dineen, the director and, with Jim McKeon, the writer of this new play. Dineen's is a face you know without quite remembering why. It's the face of that barman in one television series, that doctor in another, that crook in something like The Bill. "I'm just a jobbing actor," he says. "That's my career, and I'm lucky to have been so busy, but it's no big deal."

Maybe not, but a working life that includes major and minor stage roles and a stream of parts in Coronation Street, Emmerdale and, most recently, Judge John Deed is what makes this actor, whose 10-year stint at the National Theatre in London naturally passes without comment in his native Cork, seem like someone known for a long time.

Which is how he describes the rapport with O'Connor that has brought him now to this sunlit school hall and his collaboration with McKeon, an O'Connor encyclopaedia. "I was on tour in Norfolk, and feeling kind of lonely, but found a collection of short stories by Frank O'Connor in the local library. And when I began to read them, it was as if someone I knew was speaking to me," says Dineen.

That's the way McKeon tells it, too: as a child, homesick, vulnerable and alone in his aunt's Dublin hotel, he was introduced to O'Connor's stories about Cork by the manageress, "and I became an addict".

To both men, the writer's voice was so immediate and so personal, it is as if they were stricken by nostalgia, although Dineen seems the less consumed. McKeon took early retirement from his job with An Post and began to concentrate on his own plays, poems and stories.

His long-term friendship with O'Connor's widow, Harriet O'Donovan Sheehy, and his contact with O'Connor's children encouraged him to write Frank O'Connor: A Life, which was published in 1998.

Born in Railway Cottages in Blackpool, McKeon's affiliation to O'Connor, whom he never met, has given him a lecturing as well as a writing career. Dineen's commitment is more rationed although, born near the Fever Hospital steps, he too has a strong geographic consciousness of Cork's north side.

With a wry refusal to make much of the poverty of his childhood, he admits he was invited to leave school at 14. He left Cork in 1974, determined, he says, "to have a crack at the Abbey". He had no acting experience. Theatre in Cork was a different world to the one he knew. It was all Gilbert and Sullivan, and even when he went to what he thought would be a rough play - Brendan Behan's The Quare Fellow - its presentation suggested, to Dineen at least, that they were all on holiday. "I understood rough," he says. "That was where I was from."

And rough, it seems, is part of the link to O'Connor's childhood. Funny as the childhood stories might be, they have an undercurrent of grim realism that, in O'Connor's words, ascends from sordid to squalor.

After an audition, the Abbey told Dineen he needed experience. He joined Butlins in England as an assistant stage manager with the camp repertory company, went from there to Lincoln Rep and on throughout the UK and Europe, writing radio and stage plays, acting and directing. He's too polite to mention it - and perhaps, like any professional, he never recalls the bad reviews - but that frisson of coincidence reminds me that I responded brusquely to Barrack Street, his nostalgia-ridden play at the old Everyman some years ago.

His career included a stint with Donovan Maule's repertory company in Kenya, where he met his actress wife, Mary Corkery. Again the trickle of coincidence slips like a tributary into the river of our conversation: Corkery is the grand-niece of Daniel Corkery, O'Connor's idol, mentor and demoniser. The Dineens have their Irish home on the same terrace in Passage West where Corkery died.

The mention of Corkery is a reminder of how much more there is to O'Connor than the 'Oedipus Complex' and 'First Confession' days on which so much of Mammy's Boy is based. We talk of that extraordinary passion of retrograde enlightenment that led Corkery, himself a writer of no mean power, to disown O'Connor and Seán O'Faolain, his two most famous - perhaps only famous - pupils.

O'Connor's early alignment with Corkery is summed up in his confession that to say he took the wrong side in the Civil War "would promote me to a degree of intelligence I had not reached. I took the republican side because it was Corkery's side."

Dineen, whose work with the National Theatre became his university - "whatever they put you into, you had to do a kind of thesis on," he says - feels part of the problem was that Corkery stayed local while O'Connor became international. Not only that: O'Connor's was a unique voice, while Corkery, educated in a colonial image, remained helplessly English in style despite his nationalistic evangelism.

This corrosive argument - by the end of his life Corkery refused to let O'Faolain or O'Connor be mentioned in his presence - has its fascinations and its interpreters from Terence Brown to Patrick Maume, but it is not part of the scenario for Mammy's Boy, nor does the script move beyond the 12-year-old Michael O'Donovan at Harrington's Square on the Old Youghal Road in Cork. "We even took the early Corkery out," says Dineen. "Once we opened that chapter, it became a kind of Pandora's box, and lots of things flew out, so we decided to stop there, at the more innocent years."

And once O'Connor went away, he became a different man: the career stretched so limitlessly, and the body of work - plays, novels, translations, criticism, short stories - is so big that, as McKeon says, there was no way of containing it within the brief they were given (although McKeon is writing a play based on O'Connor's adult life).

When he had to explain to his agent in London why he was coming to Cork to direct this play and take the part of Big Mick, Dineen said that if an actor's life is a search for himself, then "this is the nearest project I've ever done that is close to myself, so I had to do it".

This is not his first collaboration with McKeon. They produced the short film Ardeevan as a pilot for a feature based on The Charnel House, a 1990 book by the Wexford author Eamonn McGrath. Coincidence arrives again, and runs riot: McGrath is the father of Garvan McGrath, the UK-based actor who plays the narrator in Mammy's Boy.

At lunch they talk of the terrific local cast they have assembled, from McGrath to Kay Ray Malone, Tony Duggan, Michael Finn, Sean Healy and Mary Condon, not to mention Mayfield Brass Band and their juvenile leads, Don Morrissey and Jack Moriarty. The sunshine pours into the Enterprise Bar at South Gate Bridge, and I am unloosed into reminiscences of my own, remembering that O'Connor was a friend of my mother's family when she lived on the Old Youghal Road. Her brother Bob is mentioned in An Only Child. My mother's pet name was Dolly. Dineen and McKeon remember that their mothers were called Doll and that they died on the same day. There is a friendly silence before McKeon breaks it with the announcementthat it was here, in the bar formerly known as the Flying Enterprise, that he got engaged. Time to go.

Mammy's Boy opens at the Everyman Palace Theatre, Cork, on Wednesday