It is seven years since Michelle Read's father died. It helps to have a sense of distance for her play about the family's loss, she tells Peter Crawley

'So why am I doing this?" Michelle Read asks. "Making my dad's death into a play?" It's early on a Monday morning and the writer/performer is pacing around a small stage, chatting informally to an audience that has not yet materialised, rehearsing for Play About My Dad. From a keyboard outside Read's playing space, the composer Trevor Knight has the difficult task of putting her mourning to music.

Knight improvises a sombre, subsiding melody on a church organ, creating a stark counterpoint to Read's bright recollection. "The funeral is so great," she says. "I totally get the point of them now." Director Tara Derrington, the other half of the theatre company ReadCo, voices some concerns. "I think it's a bit too much," she tells Knight. "It makes it a bit too bleak."

Knight frowns, sensing that, beneath such a blithe display, there must be an ocean of melancholy. "I'm just getting mixed messages as to what you're after here," he shrugs. It's not unreasonable, given that Derrington and Read have also suggested using the theme tune from The Archers. People grieve in different ways.

The strange journey of Play About My Dad - and that of its author - has been measured out in such discussions.

"I didn't want it too be too sentimental," Read says of a play that documents - through stand-up monologue and projected images, a structured script and improvised elements - her childhood, the stories of her parents, and her father's death from cancer, the night before she took her second play to the Edinburgh Festival.

This play, however, is a collaborative effort and, in more ways than one, it must now become a shared story. "We all say: it's not sentimental, it's poignant," says Read. "But that means different things to different people. It has to have a universal appeal. It can't be like showing you my photo album. You know, looking at other people's photos can be intensely boring. But sometime people's stories - and their key event stories - are very interesting. So it was one of those."

When Play About My Dad finally opens in Project, it will be more than seven years since Barry Read (also known, by virtue of his first initial and surname, as Hovis) died, and in the intervening years Michelle's piece has moved from an account written in the aftershock of his death, to a very short radio play script, to a work in progress staged in Project in 2001 and then a full-length radio play broadcast by RTÉ Radio in 2003. The final production will be Read's sixth revision along a cathartic and celebratory journey, her pain diminishing with each redraft.

Consequently, Read now tends to talk about the play as a technical exercise, elaborating with ease about funding for the production, or even her vocal modulation, rather than volunteering to discuss the play's emotional core.

With time, she says, "You become more objective. I'm glad we're doing it now; for that sense of having a bit of distance from the material." She adds, "Maybe we're too objective about the material."

She admits that one of Derrington's more common director's notes is to refrain from dampening her emotions. "No, let's not pull back from this," Derrington will say. "That was how you felt. Reconnect with that."

Time heals all wounds, of course, and though Read's play thrums with warm memories and childhood imaginings, the performer, unlike the mourner, can't allow her grief to be worn away. In any other circumstances this would be theatrical Catch-22. Having inherited from her working-class Norwich parents a reticence to express emotions, Read has constructed a project that demands a performance of emotional frankness. The detail is already in the script.

Among the family photographs and camcorder images that envelope the domestic intimacy of the performance space (some retrieved from her mother's cupboard, under a clutter of old board games and forgotten memories) is a still more striking image, reported through speech alone: "I run down the hall to the loo, catching my reflection as I pass a mirror. I am the image of grief; pale, tear-stained, shattered - and as I've never experienced this before and I'm an actor, I make a mental note of it."

Expressing this grief requires mediation, self-deflection. And, unlikely as it sounds, for Read that buffer zone is stand-up comedy.

Read began working as a stand-up while studying a Performance Arts BA in Middlesex College. Through the initiative of a teacher who ran a comedy club and initiated a comedy module, she started gigging to supplement her student grant. Within a year she had played in London's Comedy Store. "This was in 1985," she recalls, "it was the second wave of stand-up comedy with Jo Brand, Julian Cleary, those kinds of people starting out, so it was still relatively new. People weren't being fast-tracked into TV."

Her early material was based firmly on sexual politics, drawn from conversations with her fellow students. "It was a whole milieu of people who would sit and chat quite openly about their lives and their loves. So my set was constructed out of a lot of stories from the people I was mixing with."

Moving to Dublin in 1991, she became a founding member of The Dublin Comedy Improv before setting up ReadCo in 1996.

"To get that laugh," she says of comedy, "you're looking for people to understand what you're talking about. So I was interested in hearing that reaction: 'Yes! I know that!'" The playwright and the stand-up may not be far-removed; both use their own experiences as material; both wait for the laughter of recognition or the sigh of identification.

"Think of that as stand-up delivery," Derrington had told Read in rehearsals when she worried about over-emoting. "It really needs that to work." "The performance draws on the stand-up tradition," Read admits. "It's not a stand-up show, but there are definitely parts of it that have stand-up rhythms in the way they're delivered." On the other hand, it is a highly theatrical piece, skipping along a timeline from the present to 1998 and on to her parents' youth while placing the audience in the centre of the performance.

Exhibiting her photographs and unfurling her memories, Read is still undecided about whether through style and content she is laying herself bare. "You are performing, in a sense," she says. "But I think it's honest in that it's an authentic piece." Her father, a man private with his past and his emotions, who kept the graveness of his illness a secret from his children, might have been less comfortable.

"Oh he wouldn't like it," she replies immediately. "Maybe if there is such a thing as looking down, he might be quite chuffed. But I think as a living person, the idea of having the spotlight on him, of having lots of his photos and stories told, would just be horrifying. That's an invasion of guarded privacy."

Read's play makes such incursions nonetheless, but reverberates with the question of how well any of us ever know our parents. "I wanted to sit down and have that conversation with him and not be frightened," says Read. "And he died before that was possible."

Does the play grant her that conversation? "I think it does. Yes, there is a sense of getting to say goodbye, which I wasn't able to do. But, in a sense, it's not that personal a piece. There's a lot of material that came out from my mum once my dad died that is just too private and too unprocessed and has a real bearing on who my parents were and indeed who my brother and I are, but that's not what this play was. I think this play was really an exploration of bereavement."

It is also a play about nostalgia, about fragments of memory or the frozen moments of photographs, and ultimately it's about the unreliability of remembering.

"We shared a star sign and green eyes," Michelle says in the play. "If I stare hard enough into the mirror until only my eyes are in focus, it's as if I can see him staringback at me - or at least the part of him that's me."

Her mother recently read the script and told her daughter, with mild disbelief, "His eyes were blue." The inaccuracy doesn't bother Read. She's entitled to her own memories. Besides, she says, "you can't argue with his wife." That, however, is another play.

Play About My Dad opens at the Project, Dublin, Feb 2