Billy Roche's Poor Beast in the Rain is set in a bookie's shop, but explores the lives of an entire community, the playwright tells Belinda McKeon.

'We really thought we were going to make it," says playwright, Billy Roche, of the band he formed in 1975 with four of his friends from Wexford. The Roach Band took their inspiration from "that punk thing", he says, drawing encouragement from the growing success of the Boomtown Rats, and they travelled the country in a small van, playing gigs five nights a week - and returning, every single night, to Wexford.

"We couldn't afford to stay over," he explains, "so we went to Tralee, Sligo, and home again; we'd be back at six in the morning. But we loved it. We had a great time. I remember being in Sligo, and they had one of the first Chinese take-aways in the country there - stuff you'd never even touch now, but we thought it was so exotic. We'd play our gig, get our Chinese and get into the van, five of us and two roadies, and I remember thinking, this is the life. This is the life. We were just on the cusp of it, I think."

But those days drew to a close - though the band is still remembered by Irish people of a certain age, including the Wexford-born director of the Arts Council, Mary Cloake, who collared Roche recently looking for a copy of the band's first single, The Shamrock Shuffle.

"I said, you can't find one because they're all in my bloody attic," he laughs. "No, not really. But we only did 500 of them, so I don't know where they are now."

But in Roche's career as a playwright and novelist, something of his days with the Roach Band has lingered on - in fact, he says, the two careers were always, in a sense, as one, even before he thought of turning his hand to drama and fiction. "I didn't realise it at the time, obviously, but The Shamrock Shuffle was Tumbling Down," he says, referring to his first - and, so far, only - novel, published in 1986, and telling the coming-of-age story amid a crew of dreamers and losers in the town he knows best.

"I was getting ready to write the novel when I was writing the song, I think. Because the characters in the song are all the characters who came into the novel. So, you know, these things are obviously there in the back all the time, those little wells that draw you on."

From that well, over the years, have come many things. After Tumbling Down - which he wrote in the early 1980s immediately after the dissolution of the Roach Band, waking up one morning and realising, as he looked forward to getting down to the novel, that he was no longer primarily a singer but a writer - came a series of plays, also set in his native town, that would become the hugely successful Wexford Trilogy.

A Handful of Stars, Poor Beast in the Rain and Belfry explored ordinary places and complex lives in the simplest of settings - a pool hall, a betting shop, a church sacristy - and drew acclaim both from audiences in Wexford itself and from those who flocked to the extended run of all three plays at the Bush Theatre in London; the occasion is regarded by many as the moment when the British craze for Irish writing truly began: Marina Carr, Enda Walsh, Martin McDonagh, Conor McPherson.

It's perhaps fitting, then, that when Poor Beast in the Rain opens in a new production at the Gate Theatre tonight, it will be under the direction of McPherson. For Roche, however, it all began with a spot of luck.

"Patrick Sutton [ now director of the Gaiety School of Acting] came to Wexford to run the Arts Centre there," he remembers. Tumbling Down was just out and I launched it in the centre two nights after he arrived.

"And nobody ever went into that place in Wexford, and I certainly wasn't expecting them to come to this. But the whole town came. And Patrick said, what is this? Did I hear you have a play as well? Can I look at it?"

Before long, A Handful of Stars was onstage in the arts centre - with Gary Lydon in the lead role and Roche playing Stapler the boxer. "I was in the wings, and the audience poured in, and I remember standing there, listening to the play, and thinking, Jesus, I think I've written a play. I had tapped around with other things, writing plays [ including his Amphibians] for the youth group in Wexford and that kind of thing, but this was different. I think I realised I'd actually cracked it.'

Before the year was out, both Lydon and Roche were on the stage of the Bush. That such enormous audiences turned up for his plays in Wexford came as a surprise to Roche.

"I had been this old punk," he remembers, 'and I thought these people didn't like me. You know, shopkeepers, business people, those kind of people, and I thought, why would they be coming to see me? And half of you thinks that they shouldn't come to see you. But I learned something that night. I grew up or something."

In what way? "I think . . . a more open attitude to age. I realised, I'm going to get old myself. Now, I was in my early thirties at the time. But you didn't think that the town should embrace what you did."

Not that Roche's work could ever really be described as subversive, at least not where its relationship to Wexford is concerned. Tumbling Down he calls "a strange sort of love song to the town", and the plays of the Wexford Trilogy, as well as On Such As We which opened at the Peacock in 2001, could be described in the same way.

Poor Beast in the Rain explores with Roche's typical humour and sensitivity the lives of a group of people who gather in a bookie's to gamble not just with their money, but with their hopes and their chances of happiness.

It is set against the backdrop of a communal ambition, as Wexford sends a team to the All-Ireland hurling final. The air is electric, and the transition between the dream world of sporting success and the real world of broken relationships is a sobering one.

The catalyst for the drama is the return to Wexford of Danger Doyle (to be played in this production by Liam Cunningham), who changed the lives of everyone when he left for London with another man's wife.

"There's blood all over the walls," says Roche. "There has to be. One of the things that I have at the end of my plays is that I like to think that everybody has moved on to the next level, wherever that level might be. And Danger Doyle coming back is a way to set these people free, to certainly break the spell that he has over Joe [ his oldest friend, played by Don Wycherley in the Gate production] and Molly [ his teenage girlfriend, played by Andrea Irvine]. He's not doing that deliberately, but that's what he does. And if you're going to be reborn, there's going to be blood."

He does not mean this literally - this is a play of psychic rather than of physical suffering. All the same, after the Bush production of the trilogy in the early 1990s, Roche had English members of the audience letting him know that the play's portrayal of rebirth was just as forceful as he had hoped.

"It's not a quaint play. People were coming up to me and saying, this Wexford sounds like a fascinating place, but I'm certainly never going to go there.'"

Roche, on the other hand, never intends to leave there. Though he has lived in London for a brief period - in the mid 1970s, when he tried to make it as a solo singer but spent more time carrying the hod on building sites - he says now, aged 56, that he will "certainly never live anywhere else".

Though he wrote the trilogy, he says, in an attempt to "finish my fascination for Wexford for once and for bloody all", this fascination is one which keeps returning; the collection of 10 short stories which he has recently finished also has its roots firmly in the sense of place which grounds all of his writing.

"In a way it's this mystical street that I have invented," he says of his body of work. "They're all, these places, across the square from one another. I'm working my way down this street."

So much so that theatre enthusiasts could well be receiving a game of Billy RocheMonopoly for birthday presents before long. Is it a practical device for Roche, this vision of an imaginary square or street? He sees it as more than this.

"In a way, each building represents an old Wexford, a kind of metaphor for the claustrophobia of the world we live in. There's sweetness there, and it's very easy to stay in a small place. It's easier to stay than to go, and when you want to go, you think about all the things that can go wrong." He laughs. "It's very hard to fly away."

Though the short story collection - to be called Tales from Rainwater Pond, and currently seeking a publisher - is part of the reason for his silence on the playwriting front in the past four years, he talks as if he would like to get back to theatre, as if he is looking for a way back in. The years are passing. Realising recently that it has been 16 years since he first wrote Poor Beast in the Rain came as a shock, he says: "I said no, it's only about 10 years, and then I thought about it and . . . yes, 16 years."

Going back to it, watching the rehearsals and talking to McPherson, has been another strange sort of love song for him, you sense; like Danger Doyle, he has unfinished business to confront.

"It's all about dying and coming back again, basically," and though he is talking of the play, there is a look in his eyes that suggests he could be talking about much more.

"They're only small town fears that these people have, but they have to face the worst things that they could ever have to face . . . coming back here, for Danger, has to be so strange."

* Poor Beast in the Rain, directed by Conor McPherson, opens tonight at the Gate Theatre, Dublin.