SIMMERING passions left unspent, rural Ireland breathing its last shuddering glistening sexuality veiled by the trembling petticoats of 1950s' repression: yup we're in William Trevor country alright as Cork's Everyman Palace prepares to celebrate its 100th anniversary with a fresh minted stage adaption of Reading Turgenev. The man with the plan is Johnny Hanrahan, artistic director of Meridian Theatre Company, play wright in his own right and arts agitator extraordinaire, a madeyed bootboy let loose in the lily livered drawing rooms of polite culture. After a year horsing around with Trevor's thorough bred vision, he seems a bit knackered.

"It's been a long enough haul. It was around a year ago that Monica Spenser at the Everyman proposed the idea so we've been working on it since then. The strange thing is that I still haven't managed to meet William Trevor, we sort of hammered the whole thing out between us on the phone." What's it like to work with one of the grand old geezers of Irish letters? "Oh, he's a total gent, couldn't be nicer. What's great is that it wasn't a case of him going that's fine, that'll do grand', he provided a combination of complete support and absolute rigour. He's a very clear, very rigorous thinker."

Johnny hasn't come lately to the trials of adaption. With Meridian, he's already done Gogol's The Overcoat and Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent.

Both of those stuck very closely to the original text but that's not always the case. When we did Volpone, it turned into a Country and Western musical, which was probably pretty far removed from what Ben Johnson had in mind!

"When you're adapting, the most creative task is to find a theatrical language for book bound material. It's a headache but it can be a very profitable headache.

As we speak, rehearsals for Reading Turgenev are in the flustered final stages. A week ago, the text was, still being rewritten. "It's been brilliant to work with a director like Sarah Alexander because she has an extremely strong sense of text. Whereas you might think everything is in place and ready to roll, she'll say `no, we can do better' and push the thing to the limit. It's been a strange process really but it seems to be working."

Hanrahan's own plays - the most successful of which was probably 1994's The Art Of Waiting - tend to come slowly. "I'll have an idea knocking around in my head for at least a year before anything gets written down. Then it comes in a sort of frantic rush."

Any odd writerly rituals, any peculiar tics? Well, as a process, writing is very hard to describe.

My favourite description, the one I'd identify most strongly with, is Tom Stoppard's. He says people have the idea that a writer throws down the bones of, a story and then puts flesh on it. But in his case, a fully developed fingernail might emerge, followed by a bit of an eye, then a leg, maybe, half an arm. Ultimately, you find out whether you're a horse or a dog.

Though the beasts might eventually emerge fully formed, Hanrahan is uncomfortable with the notion of being seen purely as a writer. "I'm a director as much as a writer, I love directing.

There's a vast amount you can do in theatre that is not available to people in other forms. I feel that film, for example, is far more cumbersome. The technology interferes with the sort of magical transformations you can attain on the stage. The only difficulty is that film has made naturalistic theatre problematic, the technology can do naturalism better. But I see this as a good thing, it means plays can be more poetic, more inward looking."

Music plays a key role in these magical transformations. Meridian has long been keen to re introduce musical theatre, the long lost cousin of the dramatic clan. "I work a lot with John Browne, the composer. When I begin a text, he's usually in on it from the start.

We use the music as a sort of running commentary of the play's themes. But our relationship is evolving, we want to get to the stage where the music becomes the primary element.

How does he feel about directing his own work? Thankfully, I'm very aware of my work's fadings. I don't have the sense that if I wrote it, it must be fantastic. I like to think I'm pretty cold about the wholy thing. But yeah, an emotional bias does come into it, you're not going to turn around and say this is a pile of rubbish, it should never have seen the light of day'."

Since 1991, Hanrahan has been deeply involved with the Cork Arts Development Committee.

The realisation had dawned that culture's tragedy in the late 20th century is that the artist must also be a salesman: life's a pitch. So a bunch of like minded creatives morphed together to lend volume to the starving artist's cry. "It's a pretty loose knit group. Sometimes, we're very active, sometimes we're not active at all. But we lobby hard and we've set, up a marketing initiative for the city so there has been tangible progress. Basically, it's just about keeping people in contact with each other.

But the chief bugbear remains in place, that hoary old dilemma about arts funding beyond the pale. There has been some capital development in Cork, particularly in the visual arts, but there still seems to be a belief that what's really important is happen ing in Dublin. Maybe that's a semi legitimate claim. But you also have to accept the fact that most of the Arts Council's members come from Dublin and that's obviously going to be a factor." Hasn't the booming economy helped? Hasn't the roar of the Celtic Tiger been heard in the famished outback of the artistic jungle?

"If you look at the figures, the arts budget has gone from around £12 million to around £20 million so yeah, there's an improvement But in real terms, that's just a trickle. You're talking pennies and they can be very quickly swallowed up by our evergrowing capital city."

The whole sorry mess means it has been difficult to maintain professional theatre in Cork. "This is quite a big city, there's a catchment of more than a 250,000 people. But professional theatre hasn't been able to thrive. The reality is that most of the people I'd like to work with are in Dublin, simply because that's where the theatre jobs are financed. We've lost a whole generation of theatre workers in Cork."

Has this had any effect on the quality of the writing in the city? "I don't think there's been any hugely significant writing in Cork in the past 10 years. There are people here who can write well but there's no one who can speak for the city. As a place, I don't think Cork has articulated itself fully in writing."

He's right. With a few honourable exceptions, most of the recent drama in Cork has been nostalgic whimsy: loners on the Grand Parade, exiles on North Main Street, utter cornography - within which category the Everyman Palace's work has, it must be admitted, lain from time to time. It's a pity, because language in Cork has a fine musicality, all sing song vowels and lilting delivery. Maybe it's the city's famed insularity that dims the poetics: "It is insular, there's no denying it. Cork is largely controlled by a small group of people, old money. That can breed a type of unhealthy complacency. But Cork does tend to get caricatured in pretty simplistic terms, in the pages of The Irish Times as well as everywhere else."

Despite its supposed cliqueishness, Hanrahan has been happy to spend his 40 odd years in Cork. He lives with his wife, the sculptor Vivienne Roche, and their young family outside Kinsale. "I've never had a desire to live anywhere else. It's a great place to bring up kids, the geography is good. Physically, the lace feels right, My only frustrations are professional but I can deal with them. My job is to make theatre and I'd sooner make it here than anywhere else."