The liberation of Paula Spencer in Paris

Olwen Fouéré, a Franco-Irish actor currently playing Roddy Doyle's survivor of domestic violence in a French-language version, enjoyed turning herself into 'something slightly disturbing'

'QUESTION ME. Question me." A raspy woman's voice, speaking French with a hint of an Irish accent, pierces the pitch-black theatre. "Go ahead. He beat me with his fists, with his head, kicked me with his feet. For 17 years . . . " By the time the spotlight illuminates the face of the Franco-Irish actor Olwen Fouéré, the audience has been drawn into the life of Paula Spencer, former battered wife and alcoholic, mother of four, self-liberated cleaning woman.

For 70 minutes, Fouéré captivates, mesmerises. Alone on stage, she brings a cast of unseen, unheard characters to life: Charlo Spencer, the late, abusive husband; four children, sisters, a new male friend. As a French reviewer notes, Fouéré acts from her guts, "gives this character presence, physicality and a dazzling voice".

Fouéré's monologue has been adapted by the French director Michel Abécassis from two Roddy Doyle novels - The Woman Who Walked into Doors and Paula Spencer - to become Paula Spencer: La Femme Qui se Cognait dans les Portes.

THE FRENCH EMBASSY in Dublin chose Abécassis for a Franco-Irish "tandem" project as part of France's EU presidency. Sheila Pratschke, director of the Irish College in Paris told him: "If you want to produce something like that, you must work with Olwen Fouéré, who is one of Ireland's greatest actresses and who also speaks French."

Fouéré told Abécassis: "I'm not interested in going on stage and being a victim and wailing about what's happened. This woman has to be a survivor. She has to be full of life force."

Paula Spenceropened the autumn Irish cultural season here. Fouéré and Abécassis are now taking it to 11 different venues across France, until mid-December. In January, she will perform it at the Project Arts Centre in Dublin, with English subtitles.

It will be like going home; Fouéré started out at the Project with Jim and Peter Sheridan in the mid-1970s. That was a high point, along with other periods of creative collaboration, she says: with the visual artist James Coleman, the composer Roger Doyle (with whom she founded the Operating Theatre company), playwright Marina Carr and directors Selina Cartmell and Michael Keegan-Dolan.

Your average French actor might shrink from the raw language, violence and total absence of glamour in Paula Spencer. "I don't find it humiliating," Fouéré says. "I wasn't conscious of being ugly or beautiful. I enjoy turning myself inside out and being something slightly disturbing. I like going to extremes, where you're crossing a boundary into some kind of disturbance of the waters in terms of your relationship with an audience."

Fouéré long felt torn between experimental and mainstream theatre. Over the past 32 years, she has done a phenomenal amount of both, working with virtually every leading Irish playwright and director, acting at the Abbey and the Gate, with the Royal Shakespeare Company, as well as avant-garde theatres.

Paula Spenceris not the most extreme role Fouéré has played. Here Lies in film. . . , the digital version of a live installation she performed at the Irish College in 2005, is showing at the Temple Bar Gallery Studios in Dublin until November 1st. In it, Fouéré plays the mad French writer and actor Antonin Artaud, who visited Ireland in 1937, carrying a cane he believed to be the staff of St Patrick.

"I was confined in a glass box for three to four hours. I had a three-hour make-up job for it," Fouéré recalls. "By the end of it, everything was peeling: my make-up, my latex, my wig, but me too. I came out of it in an altered state, every time."

In 2005, Fouéré recorded French and English versions of the text for Here Lies, which visitors listened to on headsets. As she lay in the glass box - a replica of Artaud's room at the Imperial Hotel in Galway - she recited to herself the words of a letter that Artaud had written in an asylum, six months after his visit to Ireland, describing what happened to him.

AT THE AGE of three, Fouéré says, she had "a linguistic identity crisis". Her parents, who had immigrated from Brittany to Ireland, spoke French at home, but little Olwen refused to speak her mother tongue for years.

"I felt so different in both languages, and both were associated with completely different things," she explains. "French was the inside - home. English was outside, and that was what I wanted to belong to - that open landscape, all these people I met every day. I never felt integrated. It's only through my work in the theatre that I began to experience a kind of assimilation and integration into Irish life."

As a child, Fouéré was barely aware of the scandal that dogged her father, the Breton nationalist Yann Fouéré. For having served as a minor official during the German occupation, and for publishing a Breton newspaper during the same period, he was arrested and charged as a collaborator at the liberation. He served a year in prison, then went into hiding, fled to Wales and eventually settled at Aughrusbeg, near Cleggan in Co Galway. He was sentenced in absentia to 20 years' hard labour, but all charges against him were dropped in 1955.

Yann Fouéré is 98 years-old now, and has returned to his native Brittany. "He never talked about it," Fouéré says. "He would go up to his study every night and continue writing articles and books, his political work. We weren't part of it. But we've inherited aspects of his work, in the sense that most of us have a radical, rebellious streak."

The aftermath of the second World War was particularly hard on Fouéré's mother, Marie-Madeleine, now 91. It was a time of settling scores in France, when some 10,000 French people were killed, the majority in summary executions. "She's very marked by it; it's part of her general anxiety," says the actor. "She had a hard time when my father was in prison. They put a sign on her door saying, 'This is the house of a collaborator'. They refused to serve her in a shop. She was a woman facing this alone, with two small children."

Fouéré sees her father's work as "a cultural struggle for the Breton language and minority cultures in Europe" as indicated by Europe of 100 Flags, the title of a book he wrote in the 1950s.

So in what way is Olwen Fouéré, grande dameof Irish theatre, a "radical"? "I would certainly see a lot of my work as a form of resistance," she says. "It's carving an alternative space. There's resistance to ideas that don't conform to concepts of what theatre or art should be. I do not see my work as being about fitting in." Aughrusbeg is the only place where she feels at home, Fouéré says. The house her family lends her in Ranelagh is just a base, "where I leave my clothes and books".

She often works at night, eats when she is hungry. There are two men in her life: one in a separate apartment in the same building, the other 10 minutes away. "They know each other. It's just something that happened and something valuable that I would hate to deny, but at the same time something I don't particularly want to talk about . . . It's one of those situations you don't think is going to last, and it's 13 years now."

IN 2004, FOUÉRÉ was knocked down by a jeep on Camden Street in Dublin. She spent two months in hospital, yet she transformed what most people would regard as a horrific ordeal into "a highly theatrical experience". She turns our interview into a mini-performance, imitating Peter, the homeless man on the hospital trolley beside hers, an old woman who tried to leave the hospital in the middle of the night, another who sang "Take these chains from my heart and set me free".

Twice in 32 years, Olwen Fouéré contemplated stopping work, when she was pregnant in 1985 and again in 1991. Her daughter Morgane died two days after birth. Her son Jo-Jo was stillborn. Fouéré is determined to find something positive in pain. "I feel blessed that I had the experience," she says. "I had an opportunity to experience motherhood, to experience the tragedy of loss, but also the positive energy that can come out of things you will never have again."

The death of her babies meant Fouéré never had to choose between the stage, which she calls "my life", and raising children. "At the time, I wanted children, but I knew I couldn't combine the two things," she says. "My work is consummate; it takes up every moment. I cannot split myself."

PAULA'S JOURNEY: A RETURN TICKET TO FRANCE

Paula Spencer: La Femme Qui se Cognait dans les Portes, a co-production by the Centre Culturel Irlandais and Théâtre de l'Eveil as part of France's EU presidency, tours France (including Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord, Paris 10e Nov 12-15) before a short run at the Project Arts Centre in Dublin next year (Jan 7-10). Details of French shows at www.centreculturelirlandais.com .

Here Lies in Film, the film installation reworking Operating Theatre's original account of one man's descent from greatness to disrepute, in collaboration with cinematographer Christopher Doyle, is at Temple Bar Gallery and Studio, Dublin until November 1st (free, 11am-6pm).