Diane Parkes meets an Ambridge star kicking off the country wellies to tread the boards in the big city.

While playing the part of Emma Grundy in radio soap The Archers, actress Emerald O’Hanrahan was a regular visitor to Birmingham – but she admits she only saw a tiny sliver of the city.

“I knew it from New Street station to the Mailbox,” she says. “That was the route I took coming to do The Archers.”

But this summer she is getting to know the city a lot better as she joins the repertory cast of two productions due to hit the stage this month.

Presented by Birmingham Repertory Company, Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest and Tom Stoppard’s Travesties are a double bill with the same actors taking roles in both plays.

Emerald admits the idea of forming part of a traditional rep company was part of the attraction.

“It is a really interesting way to work and you really get time to relate to the other cast members,” she says. “And particularly doing two plays which have so much in common as you build up a chemistry that transfers from one show to another.”

Travesties is an obvious play to run alongside The Importance of Being Earnest as Stoppard takes the classic Wilde play and uses it as the basis for his own comedy. Which means that Emerald is playing the part of Cecily in both plays – but the two characters are worlds apart.

“Two characters, Cecily and Gwendoline, are picked up from The Importance of Being Earnest and plonked right in the middle of Travesties,” she says.

“But Stoppard then plays around with those characters.

“She is Cecily in both plays but in Travesties she is a different Cecily. For example she is now a librarian while Wilde’s Cecily pays no attention to books and never reads.

“I think of them as two different people but the one informs the other.

There are similarities but there are also differences. If you think that Wilde’s play is set in 1895 while Travesties is now 1917 the two women will also be very different because of those periods. There has been a world war in between and that made the lives of women very different.”

The company has been busy rehearsing since July with director Philip Wilson, former Salisbury Playhouse artistic director and performance consultant for Stoppard’s hit film Shakespeare in Love.

“The director was keen to keep the two plays separate to begin with,” says Emerald. “So the first week we all sat around the table and analysed The Importance of Being Earnest and then the next week we did the same with Travesties.