After the great send-off for Maxine in 'Coronation Street', Tracy Shaw has kicked her old character further into touch by taking on a tough stage role in 'The Blue Room', she tells Shane Hegarty

Tracy Shaw quite enjoyed watching her funeral: the way her murderer delivered the eulogy, the argument that erupted as her body was being commended to the ground. "They gave me a great send-off, didn't they? I thought it was lovely," she says. She's just heard they're putting a Maxine Peacock memorial bench in Coronation Street and is delighted her character will be remembered for a few years yet.

It's amazing anyone could remember the surname. For eight years Shaw was just Maxine, the ditzy, high-skirt and lowbrow hairdresser. She will be recalled most vividly for her final few minutes in the soap, which were spent lying face down in a pool of blood as 15 million people watched her murder.

"It's better to go out with a bang, to be part of such a great storyline," she says. She had become a bit bored with the character, she adds.

"I felt that Maxine had come to a stage in her life when she could have just floated on as Maxine the hairdresser for years without anything really happening to her. It was easy for her to go stale."

Her first role since she left the soap has done much to kick Maxine into touch. She is touring with The Blue Room, David Hare's adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler's La Ronde, in which she plays five women seducing the same man, played by Jason Connery. She chose it over the more traditional roles offered to retiring soap actresses.

"I had other options when I finished in Coronation Street, but I chose this over doing Chicago in the West End or doing an ITV drama," she says. "I have a degree in theatre and I wanted to use that and to challenge myself. It's certainly very different to doing television. It's a lot more physical, a lot more tiring. I really have to think about the role and be concentrated."

For all the efforts of its principals to suggest otherwise, the play is still best known for its nude scenes. When Nicole Kidman starred in its original London run it sold out, prompting cynics to suggest this had as much to do with the flesh on view as it did with the art.

"It's annoying. When Nicole Kidman did it, it was only a brief flash, but Jason and I are naked quite a few times, because a lot of that would be natural nakedness," Shaw says.

"When you're in bed, for instance, you're going to be naked, so we wanted to reflect that. The thing is that everybody completely forgets about it when they're in the theatre and they just see it as part of the play."

The press, however, saw it as part of a slow striptease Shaw had been performing through their pages over the years; the Sun scooped its rivals by sneaking a photographer in on the play's opening night and publishing the results the next morning.

"I had been warned about it, that there was a large price tag for photographs of the first night - and, sure enough, they were there," Shaw says.

"They were thrown out after the first time [they took photographs\], but it had upset the audience, which annoyed me more. They had been completely comfortable with the play until the flashes started going. In a way, though, it got all that out of the way at the beginning and I could concentrate on the play."

She says she chose the part for its script, not its shock value. "I didn't do it to be controversial, and when you see it you realise that it isn't that controversial. At one opening night a politician's wife said that she'd bring her 15-year-old daughter to see it. It covers a lot of issues, but it's very funny too. As soon as I read the script I knew straight away that this was the thing to do. It was a chance to play so many different roles, and I used to think there was no chance I'd get to play a part like this."

She says audiences take away from it what they want and should ignore the press. "I know that people think it's David Hare and that it must be very serious, but it's not. It's actually very amusing. The places we've gone to where people come without preconceptions, then they've laughed their heads off. It's better to just sit and relax and enjoy and don't take it too seriously."

Today, those seeing her might worry that the killer plot line came a bit close for comfort. She has returned from an enforced rest after a fall on stage that left her concussed and with a bad cut over her eye.

The news made the papers, of course, as does most of what Shaw does. Before this interview, the press agent asked if we could keep it short on the personal questions, presumably because so many interviewers don't. There has been the cocaine addiction, the eating disorder, the celebrity break-ups, the nude photographs. With her personal life always in the tabloids, it is hard for her to get people to focus on her acting.

"I think that if you come to the theatre you've come to see the performance and not the person," she insists. "The story over the photos I was okay with, but it was more upsetting for the director, who just wants to put on a good play and doesn't need the distractions. It was a catch-22 situation before, I suppose, in that I had been on Coronation Street for seven and a half years and I had to promote it, it was part of the job. You do learn to live with the attention, though. You just have to get on with your life."

Shaw is touring with The Blue Room until May. "I'd like to take a break then," she says. "I left home on January 1st and I've been living out of a suitcase since. It's not the most relaxing job, but it's part of a new learning curve for me."

She's enjoying living without Maxine now, although she still finds herself being addressed on the street by her old character's name. "It's not so bad now as it was, though. It's sort of tailing off. The fan mail is engrossed more and more with The Blue Room," she says. "They're very proud that I've got out and done something different. They say: 'We loved you as Maxine, but you have to move on.' "

The Blue Room visits the Millennium Hall in Derry from March 24th to 29th and is at the Everyman Palace Theatre, Cork, from March 31st to April 5th