Olwen Fouéré is even more beautiful in person.

Sitting in tracksuit and cardigan in a light-filled dance studio in Dublin, hurriedly eating a packed lunch, the French-Irish actress exudes a warmth and charisma that belies the often aloof, statuesque roles she plays on stage.

Fouéré has been one of Ireland’s leading stage actresses at least since 1988, when she played the lead role in an iconic production of Oscar Wilde’s Salome by Stephen Berkoff. She has acted on the leading stages of London as well as Dublin, and her career has been marked by a series of collaborative relationships that have seen her cast as muse as much as actress by pioneering artists such as video artist James Coleman, dance-theatre creator Michael Keegan Dolan and playwright Marina Carr.

Fouéré’s is a fierce stage persona, regularly used by directors to channel the furies in their productions. In Keegan Dolan’s The Bull, she was a deliciously demented, nouveau-riche neighbour in the Midlands; in Marina Carr’s Woman and Scarecrow she was a woman dying – literally decaying in front of us. In these and others, her great stagecraft, lithe frame, and wild near-white hair, and her readiness to give herself utterly to a role, have created characters of both unusual, regal beauty and sometimes intimidating ferocity.

Yet in person, that all but dissipates. The ferocity is still there, but subsumed within a more beguiling passion for her current project, and for the searing philosophical questions it raises. This passion illuminates her.

The project is an intriguing one: the premiere of a one-woman play about genocidal destruction, by the French writer Laurent Gaudé. ‘Sodome, ma douce’ (Sodome, my love) is a short, poetic monologue about the destruction of the biblical city of Sodom. It has never been staged anywhere, making Fouére’s English-language performance (she has translated it herself) a world premiere. (It runs until March 27 at the Project Arts Centre in Dublin. See www.projectartscentre.ie or call 01 8819613.)

Fouére was born in Ireland of Breton parents, and divides her time between Dublin, Connemara (she grew up in Aughrusbeg in Galway), Paris and, henceforth, New York. (She has just received her Green Card.)

Familiar with Laurent Gaudé’s work (he won the 2004 Prix Goncourt for his novel, The Scortas’ Sun), she came across a reference to Sodome, ma douce, in a literary magazine while in Paris. The title intrigued her, and she determined to read it. But it eluded her.  Eventually, leaving a show one night, she found a copy in the theatre bookshop. She took it to the Place de la Sorbonne, and sat to read it. She read it through, and when she finished, thought, “I have to do this.”

In the play, the story of Sodom is told by a woman of the city, a survivor of the initial destruction who was subsequently buried alive. Now, millennia later, a storm has released her from her entombment.

“I come from a city which is nothing but that name you pronounce with horror,” she says.

“You imagine the orgies, the nights without end, the wine flowing on the torsos of men. You imagine and you are right.”

The woman tells how, in the middle of a great feastday celebration, Sodom was suddenly attacked by a foreign army. The army laid siege to the city, and introduced into it a deadly contagion. When it had laid waste to the population, the army entered and finished off the survivors, using spears to keep their victims at a distance.

“It was as if they were killing us by the tips of their fingers, in disgust.”

Their motive, she makes clear, was to wipe out the degeneracy of Sodom, where sensuality was openly celebrated, with the women of Sodom their prime target. The narrator was the sole survivor of the massacre and, when she was discovered afterwards, she was buried alive, till a great storm frees her to walk again amongst human society, delivering “a revenge that is carried through the senses”.

“I am the face of that which has been hidden from you,” she says. “I will teach you what I know, and you will be possessed by horror and by sensuality, turn by turn.”

It is a ferocious but also tender piece of writing, and Fouéré believes we urgently need to hear it.

“It feels like it’s tapping into something that is rising at the moment. “She has such an authentic voice, that reaches across the centuries to speak to us here and now. “Hers is a subversive voice.  She brings back the capacity for joy and sensuality, a consciousness that we have eliminated. But every positive force has a negative dimension. Everything will turn upside down, because she’s here.”

For Fouéré, the destruction of Sodom symbolises the “spiritual lobotomy” that afflicts much of human society, with its institutionalised denial of desire and spontaneous emotion.  It’s not necessarily about free love.

“I’m not going to be a Sheela na Gig on stage,” she clarifies. “But we have to celebrate the enormity of the energies we carry around, otherwise they consume us.” “Any kind of force that you attempt to drive underground, the longer underground, the more monstrous will be its resurgence.”

That sounds like Fouéré could be channeling the furies again in this production. Yet she says it so softly that I suspect this might be a gentler character. There is such ferocity, such pain, and such a warning in the writing, that simply to speak the words should be dramatic. This may be a role that calls for beauty as much as, or more than, power. Either way, Fouéré is well placed to deliver.

Published in the Irish Independent March 13 2010.