LOVERS of Jane Austen won't want to miss one of two chances to see Dyad Productions one-woman show, Austen's Women, the first at The Courtyard on February 24, the second at Glasbury Village Hall on March 19.

Before reprising this five-star Edinburgh sell-out show locally, Rebecca has been on stage in London in Jeepers Creepers. "It's completely different and I've learned that the work I do with Dyad allows me to get creative from the ground up."

"I am very privileged with Dyad that I can come up with ideas that really excite me. Even before going on stage, it's a different process. On stage on your own there's a relationship with the audience and no fourth wall. The audience becomes part of the show as well. I always talk to them and get energy back from them."

Although she is now a veteran of several one-woman shows, Rebecca reveals that solo performance wasn't something that was initially on her radar.

"The first time I did it I was terrified," she admits. "But I love it now."

It was while working with Guy Masterson that the idea was first proposed. "Before working with Guy, I'd just been an 'ordinary' actor, and he said 'would you like to learn to produce?' I think I'd always wanted my own theatre company from the get-go, so I decided to do it. He said he thought I'd work really well in a solo show ..."

Explaining how she went from making that decision to her first performance of Austen's Women in Edinburgh in 2009, Rebecca explains: "We were talking one day about Jane Austen - I first read Emma when I was 15 and went on to read most of it. I fell in love with Emma - I loved how she is so flawed and gets everything wrong.

"I went on to read Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility at university as well as some of her juvenilia, and Sanditon, the novel she was writing when she died. She's seen as someone who was read by women, but that wasn't the case - at the time she was writing her readers would predominantly been men. Walter Scott was an admirer, as was the Prince Regent who asked her to dedicate Emma to him. It's very interesting that she was considered by them to be very clever. She was revered among her contemporaries. Both Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility were published anonymously. It wasn't really until Mansfield Park that her identity was known.

"If you really love Jane Austen you can come to the show and feel you're getting the real Jane Austen. I also wanted people who had never read her to come along and realise how brilliant and clever she was.

"I've used lots of the famous heroines but also women from her lesser known works, with something from Sanditon and from her juvenilia. It was a real labour of love."

This spring's tour is a return to the piece for Rebecca and she says that "it changes as I go away and come back to it. Some things are set in stone, but as I leave and do other work and come back to it and as I change as a woman it alters how I see it. Every time I do it I find new things. It's an absolute joy and I love doing it."

In April Austen's Women will be put away again, and Dalloway, an adaptation of Virginia Woolf will go on tour, and in May Rebecca is taking Jane Austen to Sydney. All this while working on an adaptation of Jane Eyre, which Dyad will take to Edinburgh this year. "I think that's the most exciting thing about Dyad. I am so passionate about theatre and telling these different stories, and we have the most wonderful team, including co-producer Elton xxxxx. "We're both text analysers, and do a lot of work on the text so we have made sure that there's a lot of thought behind what we do. We're horrible perfectionists about everything," she admits. "Every one of the shows becomes a labour of love. The really wonderful thing is that people really enjoy them. Especially when you're in a festival, up against so many other shows."

"All that matters is that the audience feel that they have got what they wanted or, fingers crossed, a little bit more - that's all I can ask for."

Austen's Women is at The Courtyard (01432 340555/courtyard.org.uk) on Wednesday, February 24 and at Glasbury Village Hall on Saturday, March 19 (0333 666 3366)