Silences framed by words

With her latest play performed simultaneously in four European capitals and two dramas on the stage in Paris - one of which she stars in - Yasmina Reza is everywhere.

Reza's Trois versions de la vie, in which four middle-aged characters act the same scene three times in different ways, is at the Theatre Antoine in Paris until the end of June. Critics have also raved about Versions at the Burgtheater in Vienna, the Broadway in Athens and the National Theatre in London.

Reza was an actress until her first play, Conversations apres un enterrement was produced in 1987. Now 41 years old, she has returned to acting as Ines in the Paris Versions, where she outshines a prominent cast. She also wrote the screenplay for Pique-Nique de Lulu Kreutz, a film directed by her companion, Didier Martiny, last year. And Reza recently made her film acting debut in Andre Techine's Terminus des anges, now being edited.

In L'Homme de hasard, another Reza play starring Philippe Noiret and Catherine Rich at the Theatre L'Atelier, a writer shares a train compartment with an admiring female reader. Both carry on mental monologues, without ever speaking to each other. "My writing places total confidence in the actor," Reza told Le Monde. "With a mediocre actor, there is nothing left of a play, no sub-text, no density in the silences, no more perverseness, nothing."

Since Versions opened last autumn, Reza has only twice broken her self-imposed ban on interviews, to talk to Le Monde and the literary periodical L'Atelier du Roman. Success has given her the luxury of not having to "sell" her work on literary chat shows or at book-signings, she explained to the critic Lakis Proguidis in a 17-page dialogue published by L'Atelier. "A writer has nothing else to say, beyond what he writes," she says.

Reza's mother is a Hungarian violinist who came to Paris after the second World War. The writer adored her now deceased father, the son of a Russian Jewish family who fled the Bolshevik revolution, and his character recurs often in her work. Although he was a businessman, Reza's father played the piano and dreamed of being an orchestra conductor. "He put records on and conducted in front of us in his dressing gown," Reza told Proguidis. "So the image of music was truly a basic part of my culture."

Characters in Reza's plays go to concerts and are musicians. She considers music and poetry to be the highest art forms and always tries "to write in such a way that words become parentheses for silence," Reza says. "We know that, in music, silence is much more important than the note; that is what I wanted to accomplish with words."

Despite her fame, Reza has produced relatively few works - five plays, two short novels and one screenplay in nearly 20 years. Her plays are bittersweet, "funny tragedies", in the words of Matthew Warchus, who has directed Reza plays in London and New York.

Reza's Art, in which three male friends fall out over a blank canvas which one of them has purchased, made her world famous. Newsweek described it as "the marriage of Moliere and Woody Allen". Sean Connery liked Art so much that he purchased the film rights. In 1998, Reza became the first non-English language author to win a Tony Award in New York, and Art has been translated into 35 languages. Success brings money and freedom, Reza admits. "It takes away the bitterness it would have been not to have had it," but aside from that, "it's nothing".