It took a male writer to satisfy Amanda Daniels' desire for a play projecting strong women, as Steve Pratt finds out.

AFTER a performance of Third Finger Left Hand, actress Amanda Daniels was accosted by a woman in the foyer who told her, "It's so wonderful they're writing parts for big-boned actresses."

What this member of the audience hadn't realised watching the Edinburgh Fringe Festival performance was that the actress was eight months pregnant.

She kept her pregnancy - and her bump - under wraps during the run. "I just kind of looked enormous," she says. "We didn't make a thing about it because it's quite a strenuous part and didn't want the audience to worry."

The Edinburgh season attracted good houses and good reviews, although the imminent birth ruled out transferring to York Theatre Royal as planned. Only now, six months after the birth of son Toby, is the play opening there.

Third Finger Left Hand is very much Daniels' baby. Adam Canavan's play about two Northern sisters growing up in the 1970s is the first offering from Nine Lives Productions, set up by Daniels and director Sonia Fraser "with the aim of developing and producing work that celebrates the resilience of women".

An unexpected twist for Daniels is that the play is by a man - Canavan, with whom she made her first professional appearance in a production of John Godber's April In Paris.

"I thought we'd find the work through a woman and ended up with this man who's brilliant," she says.

Daniels, who graduated from drama school in 2001, decided that instead of waiting for the phone to ring with job offers, she'd do something positive and set up a production company.

"I'd always been inspired by strong women," she says. "One of my first jobs was The Accrington Pals, which was about the women left behind in World War One. I thought that I'd look for a play. I wrote to a lot of women writers because I thought it was a woman I'd find writing this sort of work.

"We looked for about a year and got a lot of things sent through, mainly poetry and stories. Then one day I was having a cup of tea with one of my best friends and he said he'd written something I might want to look at."

The man was Adam Canavan and the play was Third Finger Left Hand, which was developed with the help of York Theatre Royal, where the script was workshopped 18 months ago. The plan was to premiere in Edinburgh and immediately transfer to York. Her pregnancy changed that. "Edinburgh is a great place to show a new play so we decided to continue with that as we'd done so much work. But it was totally impossible to come to York then," she says.

The play is based on the lives of Canavan's two sisters and is set in Lancashire, where he was born. It follows Grace and Niamh as they reminisce about old times, including their abusive Irish father, dearly-loved mother and their shared love of dancing.

"The play investigates family relationships; people who are close and yet not close at the same time. This family has a very violent, abusive background. The mother is timid, the father aggressive. The sisters become estranged and are thrown back together when the elder one, Niamh, is dying of cancer," explains Daniels, who plays the younger sister Grace.

Finding an actress to appear opposite her as Niamh was tricky. "We had a lot of brilliant people and an incredibly interesting short list of actresses, but when Angela came through the door we knew she was the one," says Daniels.

Angela Clerkin recalls the auditions too. "I knew nothing about the play. I went along, sat outside the room with a number of others and we had a few pages of script," she recalls.

"They were various scenes dotted around the play. As soon as I read it I liked the writing. I come from a London/Irish background and the humour is really familiar to me. It's touching subjects that are quite painful but doesn't become mawkish or soppy."

She has sisters of her own - two of them, as well as two brothers. "It was quite interesting being in the older sister role. My younger sister came to see the show in Edinburgh and couldn't believe how many similarities there were, because they're quite rough-and-tumble kids and there were two brothers as well.

"There's a lot of fun in the play too - lots of light-hearted remembrances of their games and the way they were."

The production earned Daniels and Clerkin a joint best actress award in the Fringe Report. Clerkin also received a best actress nomination in The Stage newspaper's Fringe awards.

Time constraints meant the Edinburgh version was shorter than the one that will be seen in York. Daniels is excited at the prospect of revisiting the play. "It's one of those pieces of theatre you can't fail to be moved by," she says. "Everyone wants to talk about it afterwards. Everyone has family relationships and most families have been touched by cancer. It generates a lot of positive things."

Clerkin adds: "Some people would be sitting waiting after the show in tears."

* Third Finger Left Hand runs in The Studio, York Theatre Royal, from tomorrow to June 4. Tickets (01904) 623568.