NAOMI Wallace has a guilty pleasure.

“I have a shameful obsession with tennis,” she admits. “I love to see Wimbledon. I promise myself that if I get a certain play done I allow myself to watch it.”

Despite the “elitism of the sport in terms of the people who play”, she is nonetheless a big fan of Rafael Nadel and even finds herself “warming to Andy Murray.”

Just like the late Harold Pinter’s love of cricket, the American playwright insists that tennis has all the drama of a great play. “It’s the most intense theatre that exists…the dialogue with the ball.”

When she’s not hypnotised with the dialogue on the tennis court, Wallace is busy creating her own.

A new play, ‘And I And Silence’, opens in May in London, as part of a three-month season of work by women playwrights. The play explores the friendship between two troubled teenagers amidst the brutal reality of adulthood during 1950s segregated America.

Meanwhile, a revival of her 1996 play, ‘One Flea Spare’ is currently playing about five miles away at the Old Red Lion in Islington, north London.  The tale centres on the relationships and struggles for power between a wealthy couple and a sailor and young girl kept in quarantine for 28 days during 17^th century plague-ravaged London.

Born in Prospect, Kentucky, Wallace divides her time between her birthplace and the Yorkshire Dales, where she lives with her partner Bruce MacLeod and her three children.

So, are there differences in the way her work is received in both countries?

“At this moment my work seems to be having a warmer reception in this country, and in Europe, as compared to the US,” Wallace says. “Perhaps because in the UK there seems to be a stronger, longer tradition of political theatre.”

Wallace makes the personal, political and is keen to pull apart social constructions of gender, class, or other notions of identity.

“I’m interested in relationships of power,” she says. “How the struggle for power and/or agency – or indeed withholding of that power – affects us in the most intimate ways. I’m interested in investigating how social and historical forces come to bare on who we think we are and what we need…”

While critics in New York often condemn her work (The New York Times once called her a “Marxist dinosaur”) her writing has garnered greater appeal in other parts of the world.

One Flea Spare was incorporated into the permanent repertoire of the French National Theater, La Comedie-Francaise, making Wallace one of only two American playwrights ever to have been added to the repertoire in 300 years – the other was Tennessee Williams.

And she has also attracted interest in the Middle East, having recently returned from Palestine, where she has long campaigned for the justice and human rights of Palestinians.

“I met a wonderful Palestinian artistic director who is interested in One Flea Spare. And so what interests me is their connection to my play.”

She adds: “A theatre will find its own articulation through the play it has chosen to produce. In this way, fresh meaning and relevancies are created to serve their artistic communities.”

A frequent observation of Wallace’s work focuses on her lyrical use of language and to watch her plays often feels like listening to an epic poem, her characters creating a world of beautiful and terrifying imagery.

However, while her first forays into writing began with poetry, Wallace is less keen on the label as a way of describing her plays.

“When I hear a play described as ‘poetical’ I feel like running in the opposite direction,” she says. “I don’t think I have ever consciously tried to write in a lyrical fashion. How I write is in some sense how I hear the world, or perhaps I should say how the world has been told to me.”

With two of her plays on in London over the next few months, many of us now have the chance to step into this strange and wonderful world from one of the world’s most lauded playwrights.

*’One Flea Spare’ is showing at the Old Red Lion in Islington, north London, until 16 April. ‘And I And Silence’ will be at the Finborough Theatre, Chelsea, west London, from 10 May to 4 June.

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