THEATRE / on theatre

Fanny Burney is barely even a footnote in the annals of theatre history. Despite a flourishing reputation as a novelist and diarist in 18th-century London, and despite the friendship and support of Sheridan and Dr Johnson, her four verse tragedies and four comedies were never published or performed in her lifetime. Now Alan Coveney has taken up her cause, and the London premiere of her play, A Busy Day (right), takes place on Monday (previewing now), 194 years after it was written. Better late than never.

Alan Coveney stumbled across A Busy Day in a second-hand bookshop in Bristol. He read it, loved it, won an LWT Stage Award to direct it, brought it to London and now talks about Fanny Burney with the passionate zeal of an archaeologist who has unearthed a rare treasure.

'In a few years' time, these roles will probably be as famous as Lydia Languish or Mrs Malaprop,' he enthuses. 'It's amazing how funny it still is. These jokes have lain in a dusty archive for 200 years, but they immediately start to take life in performance.'

It was all the fault of Papa Burney that the plays were never produced. He forbade her to write for the stage on grounds of respectability, and instead encouraged her to get a proper job, as Second Keeper of the Robes to the Queen. She didn't marry, and only wrote tragedies, until she was 41, when she finally escaped her father's house - though not his influence.

The new man in her life, so to speak, takes a very different line. 'I don't want her to disappear into oblivion again,' says Alan Coveney. 'I just hope this production puts her on the theatrical map, because she so deserves it.'

King's Head, N1 (071-226 1916)