writer Mike Kenny and actress Barbara Marten are the husband-and-wife team behind Caitlin, the firebrand story of Caitlin and Dylan Thomas, the English dancer and her Welsh poet husband.

Barbara is from Teesside, Mike from the Welsh borders, with a Welsh mother. Is a pattern developing here, you wonder?

"It would have been convenient if I had written it for Barbara, but that was not the case. I wrote it as a commission for the Sherman Theatre in Cardiff and it was only after I'd written it that I thought it would be good for Barbara," says Mike, at York Theatre Royal's rehearsals rooms at Walmgate.

Barbara will be performing her husband's one-woman show in the Theatre Royal Studio from Thursday. "I read it and thought it would be a good part to do so I deliberately didn't watch Helen Griffin's performance at the Sherman," she says.

Instead, when Mike and Barbara moved from Leeds to York for convenience - their children attend the Steiner School at Fulford - she called in to see Theatre Royal artistic director Damian Cruden.

"That was last June, and I said to him 'Would you have a look at this play', and he promised it would be his reading matter on a plane journey to Japan," recalls Barbara.

There was no doubting Thomas by Damian. He decided he would direct a Studio production of Kenny's account of Caitlin and Dylan's turbulent, drink-driven marriage, and offered the role to Barbara.

So Barbara and Mike are united in every way, in work, rest and stage play. They had worked together in the 1980s, first in a student pantomime at teacher training college in Birmingham, when Barbara played fairy to Mike's Dandini, and later in a Sarah Daniels' play, Masterpieces, at the old Leeds Playhouse.

Mike has long since concentrated on writing plays, while Barbara has focused on radio and television work, notably Casualty. This production will be her first stage appearance in six years.

"For us, there is no way Caitlin and Dylan's story is a direct parallel of own experiences as writer and performer, but it's almost like a strange, dream-like nightmare of how it could be," says Mike.

"If you want to be involved in some way in the arts, it is OK and marvellous when you're young, but when you have children it is complicated, particularly as a gender issue. Caitlin cooked for Dylan and the children so that he could be the artist, but she didn't like having to play that role."

In Mike and Barbara's case, he is working from home, while she is often working away. "It's easier for playwrights in that I just carry a play around with me, and though there are times when I become so preoccupied that I'm not 'there' in any meaningful way, I don't have to stop functioning at home totally," says Mike. "But acting is all or nothing; physically it's so demanding and I'm not sure I could still do it - I haven't done it since 1988."

Barbara believes the success of their relationship has been to divide family life from work. "Home is family, work is outside. At first we were both actors, so we were always talking about work. Then we had a family and our eldest son still talks about being our crash test dummy, so we made our relationship work by not bringing work too much into the home," she says.

Would Mike now be tempted to write a play for Barbara? "I don't think it would be easy, but if the right idea were to come up...? It would have to be the play that dictated it, and not the other way round."

Barbara did not argue with that. Instead they laughed together at the thought of her arriving home and saying "Come on, where's my play, and where's my tea!"

Caitlin, The Studio, York Theatre Royal, February 12 to March 6. Box office: 01904 623568.

Updated: 16:34 Thursday, February 05, 2004