Carving out a new definition for the word "prolific", Ursula Rani Sarma has in the past three years written and directed four full-length plays for the stage, while laying down sturdy foundations for careers in radio drama and screenwriting. She has co-founded the Djinn Theatre Company in Cork, which has staged five shows, and she has her first short film in the can. Over the coming months, she'll knuckle down to a radio play for RTE, a new work for a UK theatre company and a full-length film script for a production house in London. She's lately been workshopping at the BBC, where she's been invited to join a new network of writers, and she picked up this year's Irish Times/ESB theatre bursary. A story for children, Kirin the Bear, will be published shortly. Even reading her CV is enough to bring on a savage dose of fatigue.
"It's funny, because I thought that after I left college it'd be a real struggle to pick up bits and pieces of work," she says. "But I suppose the climate for young Irish writers is pretty good right now."
Her latest play, Gift, has been specially commissioned by Limerick's Belltable Arts Centre to open its annual and rapidly-evolving "Unfringed" festival. Focusing on a troubled father/ son relationship, it's a more subdued piece than she has attempted before.
"I think it's definitely my most mature piece of writing. Before, I probably realised that I could only really write for a younger audience. But now, you know, I'm a big dangerous 22, " she says.
In all her work, she tries to offer a glimpse of the often bizarre dynamics that simmer and clunk beneath the surface of the everyday.
"A lot of what I do involves imagining what goes on behind closed doors. Gift, for example, is about a relationship between a father and son where there's absolutely no affection. This is something that happens but doesn't get talked about very much," she says.
"The father is an undertaker and he has a very strange way of looking at death; he can kind of convince himself that it's not a reality. There's definitely a fairly dark feel to the story, but that's what I'm always fascinated by, the darkness in people."
Almost all of her work is set in contemporary rural Ireland, but there is a fresh perspective in the way she maps its contours that is perhaps only possible for someone born in 1978. This isn't a rustic Ireland of land feuds and unspent passions; it's a place where the young are intensely mediated, exposed to the surface sheen of a globalised pop culture and where their sense of restriction consequently cuts deeper.
This is the Ireland Rani Sarma described in her breakthrough works, Touched and Blue, plays that wowed the Edinburgh Festival in 1999 and the Cork Opera House last summer. Animated by swift-running streams of dialogue, her imagined settings come vividly to life; her vision is edgy and sometimes dystopian. Drugs are washed up on the beach, and there's an abusive doctor who "smells of onions and antiseptic".
Her rural teenagers are distanced, out of whack and frequently murderous. They storm about the countryside, drinking morosely in the back of vans, always ready to be seduced by the narcotic shimmer of their polestar metropolis.
"And of course everyone assumes that everything is autobiographical and people seem to think I had the most horrific childhood imaginable! But again, it's just that I find the darker side of things more interesting to work with," she says.
Her characters are almost painfully self-aware. They are notably body-conscious ("my hair like straw, my dress too long, my stomach in tatters") and, as they cast a cold eye on their familial predecessors, they are terrified by the unanswerable tyranny of the gene pool.
But Rani Sarma was born by the sea in Lahinch and sometimes her creations are granted reprieves from modern torments. They walk in the salt air, become ocean-tranquillised and fall into reveries.
"I hope there's a lyricism to the plays and maybe some of that comes from my Indian side," she says. "My late father was a big reader and there was always lots of Indian literature around the house that I'd be going through. The poet and prophet Tagore, for example, was definitely an influence."
A slang-ridden Hiberno-English backlit by the amber glow of Indian lyricism? Such things are possible in our developing ethnicity.
As we speak, Rani Sarma is in director mode, going over the finer detail of Gift with her actors Eamon Hunt (Glenroe) and Kevin O'Leary (Disco Pigs).
"This is probably one of the last shows that I'll direct for a while, but that's purely because of time. At least if I'm just writing, I can work away on a few projects at once," she says.
While in rehearsal, she continues to work at the script. "I tend to leave my final draft quite late. That way, I can bring elements of the actor into the character. I don't know that I have any one style, but I like quick, sharp scenes and, while this play does move quickly, I think it's a little quieter too."
Her energy - and her CV - might suggest a disciplined and organised woman, but this, she says, is far from the case.
"I'm not at all together. I was at Annaghmakerrig recently and you'd be talking to people who know exactly where their work is going and what's coming next and how things are going to play out. But with me it's more like a kind of mental vomit. It's a compulsive thing, definitely, and it's always been like that."
Full details of Limerick's Unfringed festival, which runs from January 25th to February 3rd, are available from the Belltable at 061-319866.
