Across the narrow sea

Cathie Boyd is the kind of woman who has plenty of good stories. Salsa dancing in Bogota. Slumming it in San Paulo. Nights on the razzle with Latvian musicians. And every story ends with a high laugh you either love or hate. The thing about women such as Cathie Boyd, though, is you know hers is a story only just beginning.

The 28-year-old Belfast director is also founder of the Scottish company Theatre Cryptic, which is bringing its stunning version of Sophocles's Electra, subtitled "Queen of Revenge" to Galway, Letterkenny and Tallaght, as part of the Fresh From Britain season of three plays. The Herald, probably Scotland's top broadsheet paper, called the show Boyd's "greatest work". Three actors, specially commissioned music and a bank of video screens inject great inventiveness and immediacy into Sophocles's play.

Boyd left Belfast for Glasgow 10 years ago with her heart set on being an actress. It was a dream she had nurtured through her school years at Victoria College and Methody School. School plays became professional productions when she joined first Ulster Youth Theatre and then the Lyric Youth Group. "It was just Christmas plays, you know. My favourite was playing Tallulah Bankhead in Bugsy Malone."

But Belfast was never going to hold her. "It made me hungry to leave. I'd never have done what I have done if I had stayed."

She arrived in Glasgow in 1990, when it was the European City of Culture. After years of decline the city was set on marking its regeneration, and the theatres and galleries were filled with avant-garde performance groups. The New York Wooster Group, Moscow's Maly Theatre and the Canadian director, Robert Lepage, were just some of the visitors.

"I'd come from this tradition of realistic performances and sets, a lot of political drama. Suddenly I arrived in Glasgow and discovered a whole new world. I learnt that you could tell a story through so many different forms. It just led me in this new direction."

As Boyd speaks, the light plays in her eyes, as if performances are replaying in her head from a decade ago. Glasgow has always had the swagger of a big city but in 1990 it also, briefly, had the cultural life to match. The city's former tram yard had been converted into a multi-purpose art space called the Tramway. It was where Boyd learnt a new way of performing.

Many of the productions relied on music and dance rather than speech and naturalistic acting. Theatre was learning from the disjointed story-telling of film and video. Linear narratives were out and in their place came stories that emerged, like a jazz score, from various riffs on a theme.

Boyd had come to Scotland's second city to study at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama. In 1991 she put on a play called The One-Sided wall. With the confidence of an undergraduate she decided to tackle mental illness as her first theme. She says the play was "clumsy" but it was the first time she commissioned music and tried to use it as an extra "character" in the production.

A year later and she was at the Edinburgh Festival with Brian Friel's Lovers and garnering rave reviews. The production was bankrolled by an enviable list of supporters. Not every 20-year-old gets backing from Seamus Heaney, Anthony Minghella and Kenneth Branagh. Branagh remained Theatre Cryptic's chief sponsor through the early years. Boyd's energy and talent were easy to spot back then.

The next fillip to her career came in 1993 back in Glasgow. At the annual Glasgow arts festival, Mayfest, she saw work from theatre groups from Quebec and was fascinated. Working her considerable charm on the Canadian cultural attache, she found herself a year later flying out to Montreal to develop a project with Quebecois performers.

"We took Parallel Lines to Bogota. We were having great fun with the translator, getting her to put into Spanish great streams of Joyce," jokes Boyd. It's a joke that disguises the fact that Boyd speaks Spanish and French and was engaged in her own fun while on tour.

"I am Irish but I live and work in Scotland, which I love. I get sick on these British Council tours of everyone assuming you are from London. So before we went I asked the Scottish Tourist Board for information which we could distribute in Colombia." Boyd is a confident Celt, proud of her Scots/Irish background but determined to race into the future rather than sing about the past.

"I'm interested in Latvian culture but I'm also fascinated by Japan. I mean these are wildly different things but at the same time I'm interested in discovering their common elements. There's nothing new you know, but we learn till the day we die."

The combination of music, light and movement that is Boyd's signature comes together in a startling form for Electra. The three performers share the stage only once in the whole performance. They rely on different forms of expression, some using movement and video, while another will remain static, only speaking her lines.

Boyd believes in constantly refining a production until it is close to perfect. "I'm a very happy person, easily excited but at the same time I am a perfectionist, so I am never happy with what I have done," she says. "Electra is actually a really simple classical work. It shows how man hasn't changed, emotionally, in thousands of years. We are still developing it but it has some really beautiful moments." The critics think it has many beautiful moments and say it is a performance not to be missed.

Boyd is a flash of energy in a Scotland where, like Ireland of not so long ago, apathy is the preferred mood. She is engaging, bright and funny. Little wonder that last year she won the European Woman of Achievement for the Arts Award. Her greatest appeal, though, is that she is a confident internationalist, carrying none of the Scottish baggage of inferiority but all of its enthusiasm and curiosity. She deserves her success. Go see her Electra.

Electra: Queen of Revenge will be at the Civic Theatre, Dublin on Monday and Tuesday next. It then tours to: An Grianan, Letterkenny, on June 1st; and the Town Hall Theatre, Galway, June 2nd-3rd

The other two plays in the Fresh From Britain series are Castradiva by Mark Ryan, set among castrati in Rome in 1700. It is performed by mezzo-soprano Buddug Verona James and presented by Opera Cocktail and Theatre Mwldan, Wales (Town Hall Theatre, Galway, May 30th; Civic Theatre, Tallaght, June 1st; An Grianan, Letterkenny, June 3rd) and Car by Chris O'Connell, an Edinburgh Fringe First-winning play about a joyride, presented by Coventry's Theatre Absolute and Belgrade Theatre (An Grianan, Letterkenny, May 29th-30th; Town Hall Theatre, Galway, May 31st and June 1st; Civic Theatre, Tallaght, June 3rd)