Art imitates life for a talent in her own write

Her husband whisked her off to Paris to see the sights of the most romantic city in the world.

There is a but to this story.

Jane and her husband John Godber were in the romantic city to research their latest play and their two daughters went along, too.

When you're married to John Godber, it is an occupational hazard that life might end up on the stage.

"It's not really a difficulty for me, because I know the truth, I know it's not actually us on stage," says Jane.

"The difficulty comes when you wonder if other people think it's our real lives on stage. You end up thinking,

'I wonder if people think that's actually John and me up there'.

"Particularly a play like On the Piste, or Unleashed. Then you do worry that people might think that it's your real life that's been written about."

Godber's plays are often so overwhelmingly successful because they are so true to life: he takes what seem like real life situations and turns them into drama.

With On the Piste, there is a marriage in trouble and a skiing holiday taken to patch over the problems. It was written shortly after the Godbers, now keen skiers who take their daughters off to the slopes of Europe regularly, took up the winter sport.

Then there's Unleashed, in which a group of horny office workers sample the delights of Amsterdam's red light district.

"I know it's not us, I just hope other people know that," she laughs.

Jane arrives at Hull Truck Theatre with daughters Martha, 12 and Elizabeth, 15, in tow as she is taking them swimming after our interview because Wednesday night is swimming night.

This insistence on the professional impacting on the personal is clearly a key philosophy for the Godbers.

It has to be unusual for the daughters. While mum chats to a journalist, the girls go off to hang out in the green room of Hull Truck Theatre. It can't be every young girl whose dad has a theatre to run (and that they get to hang out in) and whose mum is appearing on stage in Paris at Hull Truck this month.

"We've tried to make life as normal as possible for them," says Jane.

"We're normal. All right, we have jobs that might be a bit different from the parents of most of their friends, but we made sure they go to state school and from when they were very little we brought them into the theatre, into rehearsal rooms, so that they could see that what we do is just a job.

"Liz even had a Postman Pat rehearsal bag when she was younger, where she kept her crayons and books and would draw and write notes in rehearsal, getting involved.

"We just wanted things to seem completely normal to them, even though I know our lives might be seen as slightly more bohemian

than normal."

Jane, 48, knew John by reputation before they met.

He had been "a bit of a legend", while he was at Bretton Hall. When they met, John was working as a teacher at Minsthorpe High School, near Wakefield, the school he went to as a child.

"It was 1980 and I went to the National Student Drama Festival, where John had been taking productions for years and won pretty much every award going," says Jane.

It turns out that the very first time she saw John, Jane fell for him. Well, she was sort of pushed.

"I had heard about this production he had written and was in called Cramp," she says.

"It was a promenade production so you had to walk around and stand behind these white lines. Only, I wasn't quite behind the line, so when John came bursting in he pushed past me and knocked me flying.

"I met him at that festival and I thought he was very confident and even a bit arrogant. But he was also very charismatic, he still is, it's one of the big things that I found attractive about him," she says.

The next meeting held a similar shock for Jane.

At the time, she was working with young offenders, teaching drama, and was looking for acting work. John advertised for an actress in a production of the Stephen Jeffreys' play Imagine.

By this time, Godber was studying in Leeds for his PhD in Germanic theatre and Jane called him.

"He told me to meet him in Leeds for an audition and I assumed everything would be organised, maybe the audition would be up at the uni or something," says Jane.

"I arrived at the station and he was there to meet me in his Austin Maxi.

"I went to the car and got in the back and John climbed in with me and auditioned me there in the back of the car."

Jane got the part and the pair went to Edinburgh, for the first of a number of summers, performing at the city's arts festival.

"It was such a wonderful thing to travel up there every year. We were with like- minded people and we were young and felt like we could conquer the world," she says.

They would spend the year working and all the while planning for Edinburgh. At the time, John was living at home with his parents and Jane would spend weekends at their house rehearsing.

"It was such a lovely time," she says. By 1984, such was Godber's reputation that he was offered the job of artistic director at Hull Truck Theatre. He wrote Up N Under for the theatre's relaunch and the rest is history.

"Looking back, it was an amazing time," says Jane.

"There was an Olivier award in 1984 and Fringe First awards for the stuff we'd done in Edinburgh. So when the South Bank Show was dedicated to John and the theatre when he was just 26, it seemed completely normal to us. We didn't really understand how extraordinary it all was. I think it was quite a good thing that we were actually quite naive about all of that, because it meant we just took everything in our stride."

The couple were together, but didn't marry until much later, in 1993.

When they did marry, Jane kept her professional name, having begun to carve out a career for herself as a playwright and actor. Her plays include Wuthering Heights, Shakers, Amid the Standing Corn and Say it with Flowers.

Jane says being married to John is something of a double-edged professional sword. "My work gets judged more harshly because of

who John is, but if it's any good, people say it's because John's helped."

The truth is that Jane is a talented playwright in her own right.

In the past, John Godber, a pragmatic miner's son, has said that he would not commission her work were she not good enough.

Jane sometimes finds it difficult: "The truth is, writing plays is difficult enough as it is. But living with someone like John who it comes so naturally to, makes it doubly hard.

"We have the same agent and I was talking to him, saying how hard it is.

"It's like trying to write music and living with Lloyd Webber.

"My agent helps me put it into perspective and says I really need to

compare myself to other playwrights, I can't compare myself to John, because I just happen to be married to one of the most brilliant playwrights in the country.

"When I get some perspective I realise that I have had my plays published, worked in television, radio, won a Bafta.

"Yes, John's got lots of awards on the wall at home. But it's nice to look and remember that some of them are mine, too."

John and Jane star in April in Paris, Hull Truck Theatre, March 4 to 27.