"I will bring a bowl of salt and water to bathe your feet. I will save you from the fire. I will make an ark and set it among the rushes for some Pharaoh's daughter to find."

The idea of saving someone who is fleeing persecution is a seductive one, going back to the rescue of baby Moses in his floating basket. From that time to this, there have always been people forced to hide or migrate from their native land and throw themselves on the mercy of others. Trying to help such oppressed peoples invariably involves varying levels of success and guilt. "How far does compassion go?" asks Elizabeth Kuti. "This is a very contemporary issue, how you treat a stranger in your midst." As a playwright, Kuti (30) is more concerned with failure than success: "Dramatically, people's feelings of guilt are more interesting than those of triumph." Her new play, Treehouses (which recently won a Susan Smith Blackburn Award for women playwrights in the UK), is about the efforts of Magda, a young woman in an unspecified Eastern European country occupied by the Nazis, to hide and save a Jewish boy on the run: "It's a kind of love triangle with different kinds of love and attraction going on." Directed by Jason Byrne, Treehouses opens in the Peacock on April 11th.

The story was inspired by Kuti's own family background: "My father was a Hungarian Jew. During the war, my grandfather was sent to a labour camp, but Dad was smuggled to the home of a friend of the family, a Catholic woman, who hid him until the end of the war. He was only about two, and was probably passed off as a cousin from the country. She had him baptised a Catholic - the Catholic church in Hungary was very helpful in that way, protecting Jews. "A lot of my father's family died. He left Hungary in 1956 and went to England, where I grew up. He still goes back to Budapest to visit that woman who took him in. She is very old now, but the Hungarian government recently honoured her with a state award for what she did during the war - my father was not the only Jew she saved."

Kuti is aware that as a theme, the Holocaust is not particularly new, but she does not feel it is a vein that has been fully mined: "If anything, I think people have been tentative about exploring it, for obvious reasons, and I share that feeling. For example, it is not something that I can easily discuss with my father. I'm anxious to be respectful. I haven't tried writing it as a naturalistic war drama. I couldn't do that - I wasn't there. What I have are shreds of information. Perhaps that's why my approach is oblique and fragmentary." She has kept facts to a minimum so that the story is closer to fable than history: "I wanted it to have a timeless quality. As I was writing I was watching scenes from Kosovo on TV, with images of houses being burnt and people on the move. I'm interested in all the nomads of the 20th century, not just my own family."

Treehouses features a second story which interleaves with Magda's: that of Eva, a young woman in mourning for her father. A parallel mood is established, in that Eva feels let down by her father, and Magda feels she has let the Jewish boy down. But it is not until the end of the play that we realise the full extent of the connection between Magda and Eva.

Kuti likes to keep her cards close to her chest when she plots a story: "I'm interested in withholding information. I love intricacies of plot." This quality was evident in Kuti's last theatre project. Almost exactly a year ago, Rough Magic opened its production of The Whisperers in Dublin, an unfinished play by 18th-century playwright Frances Sheridan (mother of Richard Brinsley), which Kuti had completed, and which eventually travelled to the Edinburgh Festival. The ending of the Sheridan play featured a similar clever, revelatory twist: "Trying to tell a good story does involve a certain amount of suspense," she admits.

Kuti has many strings to her bow. After years of taking part in youth drama in England, doing her degree in English at Oxford and studying at RADA, she came to Dublin in 1993 to do her PhD at Trinity on 18th-century women actresses and playwrights. While completing her research, she came across Frances Sheridan's abandoned third play, The Trip to Bath, and decided to finish it. In spite of the demands of writing in arch, ornate Restoration Comic style, it took her only a few weeks. "It was a challenge, but it was fun. I felt quite protected, as though I were wearing a mask, because it was someone else's story, characters and language."

All the while she was keeping up her acting career: "Two days before I was due to hand in my PhD, I got the lead in The Colleen Bawn at the Abbey." She sees no conflict between the two: "I love acting and writing. They both come from the joy of communicating with a live audience." In 1995 Kuti's two-hander, The Lais of Marie de France, was performed at Andrew's Lane Studio, with Kuti herself performing: "It is based on a series of 12th-century fairy tales which are rather fun, full of courtly love, werewolves and damsels in distress." She has also written a hitherto unperformed play about Emily Dickinson. A current project is the adaptation of Paul Smith's The Countrywoman for Declan Gorman's theatre company, Upstate, in Drogheda: "The dialogue is marvellous. It's a joy to adapt."

Her PhD began as a reclamation of 18th-century women playwrights, who, although popular in their own time, have largely been forgotten "due to censorship and suppression of women writers generally. They've been left out of the history books. Any sense of their place in the tradition has been lost." She started writing plays herself because of the dearth of contemporary women playwrights. At the risk of beating an oft-sounded drum, why does she think there are so few plays by women put on the Irish stage? "Don't start me!" she exclaims. "I think it's partly because directors choose plays that speak to them, and most directors in Ireland are men, therefore they are possibly less inspired by women writers."

Now settled in Ireland permanently with her husband, actor Robert Price, and expecting their first child, Kuti is "hungry" to start a new writing project. As evidenced in Eva's stream-of-consciousness monologues in Treehouses, Kuti's interest is in exploring a theatre that goes beyond naturalism: "Treehouses is a play for voices; it is not entirely about dialogue. I want to put the inner life on the stage, which might express itself in poetic language, and then juxtapose that with the banal and the everyday. I think theatre should simultaneously be able to show both the inside and the outside. It's like choreography, the way so many different realities can be shown together."

Treehouses opens at the Peacock Theatre on April 11th