One of Canada's most innovative theatres is adding to its reputation by staging a string of modern Irish plays, reports Karen Fricker.

Everyone who cares about such things in francophone Montreal agrees that Théâtre La Licorne, or the Unicorn, is the hottest theatre in town. One newspaper recently tried to deduce "the secret of La Licorne"; another praised it as the one place that consistently puts on works that challenge and delight. The theatre's productions were nominated for 10 prizes and won two at this year's Soirée des Masques, Quebec's leading theatre awards.

Increasingly since 2001, when the theatre produced Martin McDonagh's The Beauty Queen Of Leenane, its artistic director, Jean-Denis Leduc, has programmed freshly translated versions of new Irish plays. The season ahead includes Mark O'Rowe's latest play, Crestfall, titled, in Olivier Choinière's translation, Tête Première, or Headfirst, and Hilary Fannin's Doldrum Bay, whose English title its translator, François Létourneau, has chosen to retain.

Tête Première opens in March; Doldrum Bay opens sooner, on October 19th. The production of Fannin's play is the outcome of a unique translation residency run by the Montreal-based Centre des Auteurs Dramatiques (Cead), or Playwrights' Centre, in tandem with the Abbey Theatre. The residency gave Fannin and Létourneau ample access to commodities most writers and translators rarely benefit from: personal contact, time and skilled assistance.

More about that later, but first to La Licorne, a place that, on the face of it, doesn't exactly scream "play-goers' paradise" nestled next to a strip club and a bingo hall on a busy road on the edge of Montreal's hippest area, the Plateau Mont-Royal. Leduc and several friends founded Théâtre de la Manufacture, the production company that now runs La Licorne, in 1975, in the wake of the cultural coming of age in Quebec known as the quiet revolution.

Unlike many Quebec theatres, however, La Manufacture never went in for devised, collaborative work; Leduc's interest has always been in new plays. "I have a vision of theatre," says Leduc, "which is embodied in the writers that we work with, that is based on theatre that has two feet on the ground, on what is happening in the world now, that is theatrical but not overacted."

La Licorne's main playing space has only 150 seats, which creates an intimacy between stage and viewers that for Leduc is crucial. "We have to find that connection with the spectator," he says. Leduc first encountered O'Rowe and Fannin's work through Cead, with which he works closely in its work fostering international links for Quebec playwrights. The Abbey and Cead linked up after Ali Curran, head of the Abbey's Peacock stage, heard about the residency programme.

She and Jocelyn Clarke, the Abbey's commissioning manager, sent a selection of scripts, including a number by some very well-known Irish playwrights, to one of Cead's dramaturges, Nadine Desrochers.

Fannin was delighted but surprised when a Cead panel made Doldrum Bay its unanimous choice for translation. "I understood my play was there as an outsider," she says. Doldrum Bay, Fannin's second full-length play, was staged at the Peacock in May last year in a production, directed by Mark Lambert, that received respectable but not rave reviews; it seemed fated, like so many new plays, to slide rather rapidly from view.

What made Fannin's play a perfect choice for a Quebecois translation, according to many involved in the Licorne production, is its treatment of societal concerns that both cultures share, particularly the role of the Catholic Church. The play, a dark comedy, concerns four fortysomething friends in contemporary Dublin whose lives are rapidly falling apart; its central gag is the professional opportunity dangled before its two central male characters: to devise an ad campaign that will resuscitate the reputation of the Christian Brothers.

This joke will resonate with Quebec audiences, predicts Létourneau, but at a distance. "Fifty years ago Quebec was really Catholic, but since that time our society has changed like few societies have ever changed. The Church here now, it's totally gone. But when I went to Ireland recently I got the impression that the Church is much more a part of people's lives."

Philippe Soldevila, who is directing the Licorne production, agrees. "Culturally, we have the same obsessions. When we read Irish plays - by Friel, or the Leenane plays - we feel at home but with about 15 years' difference."

Soldevila, like many involved in the Doldrum Bay process, has high praise for Létourneau's translation, calling it superb. One of Quebec's most celebrated young playwrights, who, like Fannin, started as an actor, Létourneau was the instinctual choice of the Cead panel. "When you read a play the important thing is to find its rhythm, its breath," says Leduc. "François and Hilary, they write with the same breath."

With ironic appropriateness, given the play's subject matter, the translation residency took place last September at a Jesuit monastery and retreat centre on the north shore of Montreal island.

There Fannin, Létourneau, Desrochers and Clarke worked for nearly two weeks, going through every line of the play to discuss word choices and cultural references that might need to be unpacked. Do Quebeckers know what Rescue Remedy is? Is our use of the word "bum" well known enough in Quebec to support a joke around it?

These details are not taken lightly, says Desrochers, and they add up. "When you talk about language you're talking about much more than the linguistic reference of a culture. You're talking about rhythm, syntax, how things will feel in people's mouths and how they will sound in other people's ears. These are all hard choices to make."

Besides this table work, Fannin says that one of the best aspects of the residency was the time it gave the participants to tackle larger issues around the play. "François and I were able to talk about nuance and character. Why did this person say that? That discussion unlocked the play for him - and for me."

Cead's residencies also include a staged reading of the newly translated script, which last year took place at La Licorne. After the reading Leduc told Fannin he liked what he heard - but wanted less of it. "Jean-Denis said, I need this not to have an interval," Fannin recounts. "So I said I'd cut it. He said, I bet you won't cut it enough. I told him I would."

Fannin got the shears out, bringing the play down to 90 minutes. "It was very enjoyable. They're only words at the end of the day; they're not limbs. I feel this version is much tighter. I sent it to my agent recently and told her to consider this the approved version."

Once he had agreed to a full production Leduc's next decision was about who should direct. "I wanted someone who was going to go elsewhere than a realistic way," he says. "I didn't want it to take place in an apartment." This is one of the most distinctive aspects of Fannin's script, and one that was not realised in its Peacock production: her stage directions indicate that, though individual scenes take place in domestic locations, the overall setting is a beach, which reinforces the sense that her characters are washed up.

He made another excellent choice in 42-year-old Soldevila, who started directing as a protégé of Quebec's best-known (and surely least naturalistic) theatre maker, Robert Lepage. "This play speaks to me," says Soldevila, "because I am part of a generation that did not get married, that sent away religion. We had to invent our lives, our morals and our structure of living . . . and now we all just run and run. We traded God for objects. In this play we see people desperately alone and lost. They have money but nothing else. It's a funny play, and people are going to laugh, but on another level it is an immense tragedy."

With Jean Bard, his designer, Soldevila has conceived a spare scenic design: an open area covered in sand. "There's no life, just half-destroyed objects, as if the water has brought old things there," says Soldevila. "They're like people in a devastated world, but they don't realise it. They don't even listen to themselves."

The overlapping, manic quality of Fannin's dialogue has thrown his actors for a loop, says Soldevila. "None of them has ever had a script that is so difficult to learn. The characters don't listen to each other. Even when they're speaking dialogue it's like soliloquies almost." But this disconnectedness helps make the writing compelling, says Létourneau. "What I love about this play is that the dialogue is real, in the way that people go off in different directions with their ideas. To me boring dialogue is like watching tennis: it just goes back and forth."

Fannin will travel to Montreal for the final days of rehearsals and the play's opening night. "I have been incredibly lucky," she says. "Doldrum Bay had been a difficult process, and I was reluctant to go back to it. With François I found a way to look at the play again."

Although the turmoil at the Abbey has thrown all of the plans of its literary department into uncertainty, Clarke says that, in his experience, the Cead model for translation represents best practice, which he hopes the Abbey will continue to pursue. "It is important that Irish work is diffused around the world but also that contemporary international work be seen in Ireland. I can only hope that will happen. The success of this small initiative bodes well for future development of translation here."

• More details from www.theatrela licorne.com and www.cead.qc.ca