A potted history of Alex Higgins

The tortured life of the snooker maverick comes to the stage of the Soho Theatre

The eagerly awaited London premiere of Hurricane captures the exhilarating rise and fall of the legendary snooker maverick Alex Higgins, who won the world championship, only to blow it all on women and gambling.

The writer and star, Richard Dormer, perfectly captures the flamboyant womaniser in his 65-minute one-man show, for which he was named Best Actor at the Edinburgh Festival this summer, pipping 1,500 other shows. Dormer - whose theatre credits include the title role in Billy Budd, also at the Crucible, Beautiful Thing in the West End and Una Pooka at the Tricycle - also won a BBC playwriting award.

Dormer struts around the set - a rectangle on an angle, lit-up like the edge of a pool table - while using his snooker cue like a weapon. The debris of his life is represented by suitcases full of beer cans, children's toys and money.

The piece is choreographed by Dormer's wife, the director Rachel O'Riordan. Trained at the Royal Ballet School, she understood the grace needed for the part. "Just watching Alex Higgins play snooker was a theatrical performance," says Dormer. "He saw the game as a gladiatorial sport, rather than pushing balls around the table with sticks. Gene Kelley was one of his heroes and he moved around the table with elegance. But he was also inspired by the machismo of Muhammad Ali."

Dormer wrote the play before he met Alex Higgins, who came to watch the rehearsals when it first opened at The Crucible, in Sheffield. "It was ironic that it was here at the Crucible," says Domer, "as it was the scene of Higgins's greatest triumph." In 1982, Higgins won the world title and, in a famous sporting moment, cried his eyes out.

"At one point, when Higgins first heard about the play, he threatened legal action," says Dormer. "But once he saw that it wasn't a character assassination, but a celebration of his life, he was happy."

But Dormer and Higgins first met, coincidentally, in a bar of a train station in Dublin. "I was just about to board a train and I was telling my friend that I was thinking about writing a play about Alex Higgins. He said, "look to the left", and there he was with a pint of Guinness. I was wearing an orange, pigskin-leather retro jacket that he insisted he wanted to swap for his jacket, but I didn't give it to him. It was at that moment, when I sensed the danger in him, that I knew I had to write it."

Dormer, who wears a red silk shirt that becomes progress-ively wetter with perspiration during the performance, adds: "It is incredibly physical. By the end, I do look 20 years older, but that helps. It gets very punishing, but Alex's life has been like this, and I have to represent it."

'Hurricane', Soho Theatre, London W1 (020-7478 0100) 12 January - 7 February (followed by a UK tour)