Adrian Dunbar made his name as an actor, moving between stage and screen. Now he is making his début as a director - and withthe work of Brian Friel, writes Jane Coyle.

He has been cast in plays by Edward Bond and Stewart Parker, Anne Devlin and Martin Lynch, Graham Reid and Tom Murphy, not to mention Ibsen and Shakespeare. He has appeared on the big screen in The Crying Game, Hear My Song and My Left Foot and on the small screen in Morse and Cracker - and that's just scraping the surface. Yet Adrian Dunbar has never had a direct encounter with a play by Brian Friel.

That is about to change, however, as Dunbar embarks on his directing début, with the opening production for the new Association of Regional Theatres, Northern Ireland's first producing consortium. The play is Philadelphia, Here I Come!, in which Dunbar is having no difficulty finding fresh, beautiful things.

"It's all new to me. I don't have to go looking for it," he says. "It is a great play, extremely lyrical. Friel gives actors such beautiful things to say; you can rely on what he gives you to paint the scene for your audience. You are never in any doubt that you are working with a master craftsman who has a fabulous ear for what's beautiful in the English language.

"It does seem incredible that I have never done a Friel play, but, you know, it can happen. I was in London for years, doing Edward Bond and that kind of stuff. Maybe, if I'd stayed here, it would have been different. But it's like being asked to do an Arthur Miller play in New York, being asked to direct a Brian Friel play in Derry. In terms of world theatre that's where it's at. It's a great honour."

As an actor Dunbar is known for his distinctively edgy style, never cosy, always hinting at lurking danger or menace. No surprises, then, when he says he is aiming for a radical new reading of the play. In this he has been helped by the writer himself, who has amended the text and travelled to rehearsals in Derry.

Friel speaks warmly of his expectations for the production. "Because I know Adrian Dunbar and his work in the theatre, and because he understands the background from which the play derives and is in sympathy with it, I am confident that this production will be vigorous, intelligent and nimble."

Dunbar is quick to return the compliment and underlines the value of the partnership. "Brian has been really kind and helpful to me. At his instigation he has made some cuts in the text, so we've been working the play together - reworking it, even. There is a very dark quality to all of his work, and sometimes people haven't been as rigorous as they should about what's actually happening beneath the surface. I think he's ready to see the play reappraised. Now is an appropriate moment to look at it afresh and reassess it.

"There are many things in it that are timely. For instance, there are three women in the play and none of them has children. There are things that are universalities, that don't change, and that's what makes Friel's work great - like Chekhov, they're not bound by how we feel now about anything. They are worlds within themselves.

"It would be a mistake to try and see the play as a cipher through which we can see something else. If you support the action and support what he's trying to do it becomes a very exciting thing. It's what he writes and how he writes that make him the master of convention, the person who can excite you by his use of the tools of the theatrical trade."

Although he continues to live in London, Dunbar declares himself more than happy to be returning ever more frequently to his own tribe and to his little house in Co Leitrim, just over the Border from his native Co Fermanagh.

He continues to juggle film, television and stage work with considerable dexterity - he appears alongside Neil Morrissey, Pete Postlethwaite and Donnie Wahlberg in the newly released Triggermen, which was shot in Toronto last year.

"I am very happy to be amongst my own people", he says. "I'm happy to be amongst people who understand my shorthand and understand what I'm like. But I like keeping all my options open. A lot of doors have opened in the last few years, and I have decided to walk through them.

"I've been choosing to do a number of different creative things, which require a lot more prep, a lot more work and diplomacy and all the rest of it. But I seem to have the wherewithal to do that, so I'm happy to keep pursuing them."

He has also been assuming an increasingly high profile in the issues surrounding the arts; he was, for example, one of the leading figures in Belfast's unsuccessful bid to be Europe's cultural capital in 2008.

One wonders, in the light of that disappointment, how he views the state of the arts in Northern Ireland. "We have lots of beautiful theatres, but we don't have a pile to put in them," he reflects. "There seems to be a lack of confidence about giving money to individuals with vision - unless they have a different accent! We have millions of quid for building, but we don't seem to have half a million quid for putting things on in the theatres. Buildings are OK, but they are not going to survive.

"In the North we live in a reductionist society. If you can't drive it or wear it or eat it, what use is it? At the same time as we were going for the capital of culture they were tearing down Seamus Heaney's house [on Ashley Avenue in Belfast, where he wrote some of his best-known work\].

"We have to realise the arts are under pressure. They can't be used for social engineering; they can't go in and solve social problems.

"What you realise as you travel round the world is that the only thing that mankind keeps is what's beautiful. Everything else is thrown away. If we are serious or confident enough as a culture or a community to think that we should leave some trace of the fact that we were here, we can forget about building ships or city halls, because they do not survive.

"What's going to survive are a few of Basil Blackshaw's paintings or Seamus Heaney's poems or Brian Friel's plays. It says to me that a community that is not getting behind culture is a community that knows it's not a community. You are flagging to the world that you don't believe in yourself if you don't support the arts."

Philadelphia, Here I Come! is at the Millennium Forum in Derry until tomorrow; it then tours to Cookstown, Armagh, Coleraine, Enniskillen, Dublin and Cork