Shelagh Stephenson is a journalist's dream. Not only because she speaks in complete sentences - she speaks in entire chunks, in fact - but also because what she says is witty, interesting and straightforward. She launches into the interview with brio - no need to bat around the usual wimpy warm-up queries - and the whole thing is quite a laugh.

The Memory Of Water, her phenomenally successful, Olivier-winning comedy about sisters, mothers, death, relationships and funerals, is, despite its sombre spine, a laugh as well. It has just opened at the Peacock Theatre in Dublin, the Irish debut of a text that is better travelled than most of us.

For now, Stephenson seems resigned to being recognised for only one piece of work. "I wish they'd do another one, but they don't," she sighs. "It's like having a child who has left home, and I don't know what it's doing. It has become something that's got legs of its own."

Those legs are more than sturdy, like those of a confident young girl rather than of a stumbling toddler. First produced the play has also been staged in Croatia, Finland, Poland, the US, Canada, Germany, Belgium ... more places than Stephenson can conceivably attend.

"I didn't go and see it in Greece, for example, and I didn't go and see it in Tel Aviv. Or anywhere in Scandinavia. Or Buenos Aires. Oh! Japan. The Japanese version - that's the one I'd like to have seen."

What makes a show that good? In this case, it's the approach to families: the old roles that sisters Theresa, Mary and Catherine reassume, despite their ages, the psychic obligation to grieve the death of their mother, the need to organise the funeral, the effect death has on their lives. Plays with universal themes, told in a distinctive voice - with the bonus of three strong roles for women. Local companies are able to take them on and make them their own.

"The German version was strangely operatic - they all had wigs on. I don't know why," laughs Stephenson. "Even the American versions are peculiar. They're much more sentimental. It's trying to keep North Americans on the straight and narrow, because they have a yearning to tip over and do a lot of crying."

Stephenson is refreshingly unsentimental about The Memory Of Water, despite the fact that personal events spurred its creation. That the death of her mother inspired the work is fact, yet she is quick to point out that, but for two scenes, the rest is fiction.

"When my mother died, I thought: maybe this is just my family, or just appalling people. But when I wrote this play, because it has been on everywhere on the planet, I thought: oh, maybe all families do this, maybe it's always a mixture between tragedy and farce."

A promising Irish cast will be directed by Mark Lambert, who did such a boisterous and sure-handed job of Ken Bourke's The Hunt For Red Willie in December.

Lambert is an old university friend of Stephenson, and acted in one of the English versions of the play. Her involvement in this production goes a bit deeper than it would with most revivals, in so far as she and Lambert talk all the time anyway.

"So when he says things like, 'I've had this idea,' I can say no." She laughs. "He's very, very good, actually. Lots of actors are quite good directors, because they know how to get the best out of actors. And they know how difficult it is. I think lots of directors don't realise that it's quite hard, because it looks easy on the page."

Stephenson was an actor for 10 years before taking a whack at the writing life. The decision to change camps has been a roaring success, and she's up to her eyes in commissions, including a play for the Abbey. Her big-screen adaptation of The Memory Of Water starts filming in the summer, and she has a commission from the Royal National Theatre in London. She must have lots of discipline, no?

"I don't. Sadly. I keep reading interviews with writers who say they get up at seven and are at their desks at seven fifteen, and I think they're lying. Most writers I know, if you phone them at eleven o'clock in the morning, they're asleep in their chair. They've got up, looked at the thing, said, 'I can't do it,' and gone back to sleep.

"I think a lot of it is not the physical writing; a lot of it is being at home on your own and not doing anything else. Most of the effort is spent getting me to go and sit at the desk and face it. And you always have this thing, sitting on your shoulder, going: 'Oh, don't bother, it's crap.' So you have to fight this voice that keeps saying: 'It's terrible. Don't write it.'

The Memory Of Water is at the Peacock (01-8787222) until June 30th