In his new play about three decades of the Troubles, Martin Lynch aims to put on stage the honesty and humour he feels have been missing from previous theatrical accounts of the subject, writes Róisín Ingle

As a writer, Martin Lynch loves a challenge. The Belfast playwright's latest work is eagerly awaited not only by his fans but by those drawn to its ambitious and intriguing title, The History of the Troubles (Accordin' to my Da). What is anticipated from this lynchpin of the community arts world is an irreverent look at three decades of political upheaval where the jokes are flying and real human tragedy is never far away.

Opening on Thursday as part of the third Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival, the play - written in collaboration with two of the play's three actors, Conor Grimes and Alan McKee - is proving one of the fastest-selling events of the festival.

The challenge it presented was to capture an eventful historical period in one hour and 15 minutes. The script was finally completed just over a week ago and rehearsals are going on in a hall off the Ormeau Road. In the next room, Lynch sips coffee and looks surprisingly calm.

"It is stressful," he agrees. "But it is what we do . . . There is a great creative energy flying around, writing at all hours."

It reminds him of his early, frenetic days with the Charabanc theatre company. "I love that energy in anything in life," he says.

Last summer, he completed a similar, though smaller-scale project when he wrote a play based on the 2,000-year history of Rathlin Island off the Co Antrim coast. Directed by Lynch's partner, Dubliner Jo Egan, The History of an Island Off the Coast of Northern Ireland got him thinking about telling the story of the Troubles through theatre.

"I was known as a 'Troubles writer' when I started," he says. "But since the ceasefires - when officially at least we are supposed to be at the end of the Troubles - I have avoided the subject. Actually, the BBC drama department killed off Troubles drama by churning out worn piles of shite that had no credibility."

In writing this history, Lynch was conscious that humour was the missing ingredient in a lot of the plays written about this turbulent period of Northern Ireland's history.

"There are flashes of it, but the humour I saw around me on the streets, in the pubs and clubs, you would only maybe get in Marie Jones's plays or my own plays . . . that was something I wanted to capture and Rathlin gave me the idea of doing the Troubles that way," he says.

"I wanted something that allowed us to fly through the decades at breakneck speed, but have real people at the centre of it. It is not farcical, it is not froth. What we tried to do was try to capture what one man and his family went through, a story that may be reflective of a lot of people's experiences."

The device he uses is a character called Gerry Courtney, played by Ivan Lyttle, a Catholic man growing up in a housing estate in west Belfast, who experiences the worst extremes of joy and despair. In the first scene, Gerry is born in the Royal Victoria Hospital on the first day of internment in 1969. The other two actors play a variety of characters who weave Gerry's story and that of the Troubles together.

Lynch, who was born and raised around the docks and in Turf Lodge (a west Belfast housing estate), says the stories in the play are about "me or my Da or my friends, things that actually happened".

Without any apologies, the play is focused on a nationalist, Catholic background, "even though I am neither", Lynch says. "I stopped all that and have a different perspective on the world." There is no attempt at balance, and the story is told by one community.

"There may be people saying that this is another Fenian's take on the Troubles, but that would be a petty-minded response," he says. "Those who know my work would be aware that there has never been any sectarian content and those who don't will just have to come along and judge for themselves," he says.

Lynch was 18 when the Troubles broke out and was "involved in all sorts of stuff. I think I am well-qualified to speak with some authority about that experience".

A good proportion of the play is taken up with the community upheaval that took the place of normal life up to 1977. "The whole community was fucking upside down, the rent man stopped coming, there were shootings every day from 1977," he says. "And then after the Hunger Strikes, it became a war of attrition and the Troubles were a series of political incidents that did not have the impact on us as a community that those first years had."

The play is in strict chronological order, and attention is paid to demographic and statistical details. Some pivotal events - such as Bloody Sunday - are merely name-checked in the script, while other incidents have whole scenes devoted to them.

One of the regular characters in the play, Fireball, works in the Royal Victoria Hospital, a place that is a potent symbol of Northern Ireland's bloody history. When Fireball is seconded to the morgue, he makes the job easier for himself by giving all the bodies the names of jockeys that have lost him money at the betting shop. The main character, Gerry, relates the flaring up of his haemorrhoids to major incidents in the Troubles and makes a philosophical connection between his ailments and political unrest.

He hopes the play, under the direction of Ray Wallace, will mark something of a departure in the way the North is portrayed dramatically. "There are very few writers who tackled it with any integrity or honesty . . . The vast majority of what we have seen on stage has been using the Troubles as a means to do a drama. There are people who have genuinely tried to explore the nature of that whole atmosphere, but how many genuinely use the art to try to challenge or explain?"

This has been a feature of Lynch's work, both as a playwright and as a key figure in the Community Arts Forum. Past work includes Convictions, The Wedding Play and The Interrogation of Ambrosia Fogarty, staged at the Lyric in 1982. He is currently working on Belfast's Carmen, a large-scale collaborative project with opera singers and the Ulster Orchestra, which will play at the Grand Opera House. It will be staged by his own production company, Green Shoot Productions, a name inspired by John Hewitt.

As voices are raised in the hall next door, where last-minute rehearsals are taking place, Lynch says he likes anyone with fire in their belly. "And these people have it. There is a really hot furnace being created and therefore what they do in the end is well-wrought steel as opposed to lighting a wee camp fire and sitting around for four weeks and putting on a big warm pot of beans for people."

The History of the Troubles (Accordin' to my Da) runs for nine nights from Wednesday. Tickets are available from the Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival in Belfast (tel: 048-90232403)