Have a Good NEWS

Sharon Horgan walks into the darkened theatre space where she is rehearsing her new play. It's Friday lunchtime, just another working day - and she's wearing a skintight black mini-dress. It doesn't quite add up: she could have stepped out of a David Lynch movie. The comedian-actor-writer dabs at her upper lip. "I thought I'd make an effort. I'm fuckin' boiling in it, though. It's like having the menopause. I don't know how people wear leather."

It's a recurrent theme in Horgan's work: what if? What if there's something better round the corner? What if I've made the wrong choice? Horgan admits the subject obsesses her. Even now, at the age of 41 and happily married with two children, she can't help wondering if the grass is greener on the other side. She's about to star in the world premiere of Terrible Advice, written by Saul Rubinek, who played Daphne's lawyer fiance in the sitcom Frasier. And she's back in the world of what ifs. "It's about settling for people when you feel you've run out of choices. My character was a bit wild, and she's got to a point where she hasn't got anything of material worth. So this man comes into her life and helps her buy an apartment. That's why she's with him really. That sounds a bit grim but it is a bit grim, this play."

Horgan lived in England for the first four years of her life, then in Ireland, her father switching from pub landlord to turkey farmer. In her 20s, she spent a lot of time with "bastards and arseholes", eventually realising this was no recipe for a fulfilling life. She refers me to Terrible Advice. "When Stanley asks my character Delilah to marry him, and her friend asks if she loves him, she can't answer." Love, she says, is such a complicated business. "You end up loving someone a lot more because there's so much at stake and there's so much shit between you. Whenever I talk to my married friends, no one's sitting around waxing lyrical about their husbands. I go, 'Who's touching each other? Who's hugging? Who kisses?'"