WE`RE talking about doing the film version of "Women On The Verge Of HRT", Marie Jones announces, standing in her kitchen, wedging her two year old son on her hip, "with the woman who produced Seven."

Jones's play about the loud desperation of a pair of woman decrying the aging process in their hotel bedroom as they fantasise about Daniel O'Donnell, hardly sounds like the raw material for a blockbusting movie. The play is unflinching in its realism, unafraid of pessimism, unequivocal about speaking to one, very specific, powerless constituency. In short, Jones's play exemplifies everything that scares Hollywood.

What makes Women On The Verge Of HRT such an extraordinary work, however, is that Marie Jones has been able pick out, focus on and then speak clearly and distinctly to exactly the people to whom she wants to speak. But, while Hollywood might attempt the feat with focus groups and test screening and multi writer re writes, Jones speaks to her audience by speaking her own mind.

Jones (44) lives in Belfast with her husband, the actor Ian MacIlhinney, and their two children, Matthew (seven) and David (two), is the veteran of more than 20 theatrical productions, has played Daniel Day Lewis's mother in In The Name Of The Father, and possesses a long, long shelf of Elite Box files, stuffed with the scripts of plays she has written or helped to write.

Hers was, nevertheless, some thing of a late vocation when it comes to theatre. Leaving school at 16, marrying for the first time at 18, (she has a 24 year old son, now in the Royal Navy, from her first marriage) Jones quickly found herself in a series of clerical jobs which in no way held her interest. I lived in a semi detached suburban world, all very ordered, with nice, neighbours who talked about their white goods and their furniture. And it was all just closing in on me.

SHE needed to find a way out. While working as a secretary in a ear company, she began to spend her Saturdays at the Young Lyric Drama Studio, which eventually gave her the confidence to move info small community theatre endeavours, and then to form Charabanc, the pioneering women's theatre company which disbanded last year.

"There were about five of us, who were all Belfast actresses, working in the theatre, not doing very challenging work, because there weren't very many challenging roles for women... I mean even if there were only small parts in the Lyric or whatever, they'd bring over English actresses. Andy we'd started to think, in that colonial way you found here We're not even good enough to go on the stage

In 1983 the group made up their minds to take control of the situation. They decided to ask Martin Lynch, author of Dockers and The Interrogation Of Ambrose Fogarty if he had "any sketches or anything that we could stick on in a pub or something, rather than standing around and looking at the four walls and getting the Joe Depressos".

Lynch's reaction was to point out to the group that, as his work has mostly male casts, it would be more appropriate for them to write something themselves. "What are you talking about? was my first reaction," says Jones now of the suggestion that was to see Charabanc become one of the most important Irish theatre companies of the 1980s.

"The background I grew up in, writers were people who were dead. There was a mystery surrounding them they didn't come from round where I lived. They didn't come from around the corner... Martin Lynch was the first one who broke through that." But he was a man, thought Jones ruefully, so it was different for him.

When Lynch addressed the group, he spoke to them in words that seem to counterpoint the eventual impact of the company "He said to us I want youse all to go away and write down a wee essay a wee whatever about who you are, where you came from, who your ma was, who your granny was. Write down what it means to be a Belfast woman. And I want these for next week".

Lay Up Your Ends the first play she worked on with Charabanc, told the story of the Belfast linen workers' strike, during which both Protestant and Catholic women staged a walk out and attempted to form a union, with a little help from James Connolly.

LYNCH suggested that he knew the perfect person in London who could direct the piece. He told the company that Pane Brighton, who had worked with John McGrath's 784 company, was "very left and we thought Oh she'll probably be some feminist or something I mean we knew nothing except that we had a feeling for this play."

Brighton, who continues to work with Jones in Dubbeljoint, and has directed both A Night In November and Women On The Verge Of HRT, helped the company make at least one crucial decision. The acclaimed production ended up as an all woman affair although this was not the original intention.

"We really thought we had toe have men in it, but they didn't want to get involved in something alike that. They were all waiting for the bigger chance round the corner. They saw us as a wee group of very `feisty' women `plucky' as we were called but they didn't really want to be involved." Brighton told the group that all the carts could be played by women, thereby, Jones says, introducing the company to a type of theatre of which they had no experience

Her time with Charabanc came to an end in 1990, when she and the last two remaining members of the company, Carol Scanlan and Eleanor Methven, began to have differences over the directions the maturing company should take. "The others wanted to do different styles of theatre they wanted to do classics. . . I thought that was a waste of time Eleanor Methven counters that the company went on developing after Jones left "We began to bring in new work from other cultures that we thought would be relevant to our, home audiences... But Marie had the definite talent as a playwright, so it is understandable that she wanted to work on her own, rather than devising the plays in the way we had before." The split, was, according to Jones, acrimonious.

Jones teamed up again with Pam Brighton and together they founded Dubbeljoint, taking the first letters of the two cities that were home to the company Dublin initial production was intended as a one oft, but now five years later, Dubbeljoint is presenting its sixth show on its 12th tour.

When Dubbeljoint first staged A Night hi November, in the summer of 1994, Jones felt that the pro duct ion marked a particular moment of growth in her own political consciousness. Her story of Kenneth Norman McCallister, a Belfast dole clerk who rejects his own community to follow the Republic's football team to the World Cup, mirrors developments in her own life. Like her hero, Jones came from a working class Protestant Belfast background, but it was theatre rather than football that led her to become a supporter of the Republic.

I wanted Protestant people to come up to me and say Y'know, can see where we have been wrong we've been left this terrible legacy, so we have to deal with it she says. "But instead, you almost felt like you were on your own feeling these things. It was a legacy we'd been left to deal with and I was dealing with it like this (in her plays) They just would not give in. It's this whole Protestant thing about hanging on, hanging on."

JONES says that she was not surprised by criticism of the way in which A Night In November portrayed both Catholic and Protestant identities nor about attacks on her apparent willingness to highlight Protestant, but not Catholic, bigotry.

I am true to myself, so that criticism doesn't really bother me. It was hard for me to do that play. It was really like something out of my soul I was true to myself," she says. Verbal criticism of the play was not, however, uppermost in Jones's mind when it first opened.

"Pam Brighton said to me Are you sure about, this play because this was at a time when you could have been a legitimate target. I wasn't that worried because I'm not that brave. If they came to the door and said That play is not going on then that Ia wouldn't have gone on but the play actually has been damned more by Catholics than by Protestants, damned by Catholics on Protestants' behalf."

A Night In November suffered criticism for offering solutions that were too simplistic, but Jones's latest play avoids solutions altogether. Her two central characters are not prepared to do anything about their fate except ignore it completely, or identify and bemoan it. Did Jones never feel the need to offer something more than a source of powerful identification?

"I wasn't really all that happy about it, but I just couldn't find anything. Pam and I were really depressed about this play for a very long time. I remember sitting in the garden with her in the rain crying, saying Have we the right? This is depressing. But this is the state of some women's lives. But unless you are angry you can't do anything about it unless you are really aware of the situation, you won't come out fighting."

With Jones's return to a broader political agenda, she also feels, that she is talking again to an audience that has been building up around her work since the Charabanc days.

"The people I write for are the people who are in my plays. They are really just ordinary people who really are powerless who really don't have a voice. I've always felt that I have this huge responsibility, because the background I came up in, nobody had any power, nobody had any voice. We were shafted, walked over everything. But now I have this arena, this power, this space to say This is still me this is the people I care about these are the things that matter."