BILLY ROCHE is talking about Tony Doyle's legendary turn in his play The Cavalcaders at the Peacock 14 years ago. He softens visibly and uses the word "beautiful" to describe the performance, and there's a palpable reverence and respect for his late friend in his voice. It's a moment that's typical of a playwright who eschews the pomposity of some of his contemporaries in favour of modesty and an engaging affection for his craft.

When he speaks of their first encounter on a tube platform in London there's an endearing humility in his tone, and you can imagine a nervier, younger Roche approaching the great Tony Doyle and then years later enjoying the pleasure of watching the same man take the lead role in what is Roche's most richly satisfying work.

The Cavalcaders is now being revived on the Abbey's main stage with Stephen Brennan taking the lead role of Terry, but Roche is in no doubt as to Brennan's ability to take on the mantle: "Stephen is perfect.

Terry's a small town man with a belly, but he's also a little god in his own world. There's a regalness about Terry I suppose, which is why you need a true actor to play it. You need a real leading actor, and Stephen is that man."

Roche is now considered one of the elder statesmen of Irish drama, having had his first real success with his debut A Handful of Stars in London's Bush theatre back in 1988. Before this there was a seven-year slog for recognition as he learned his craft and unsuccessfully hawked his work around the theatres of Dublin. Then with the Bush Theatre's acceptance of his first play, Roche became the first in a line of Irish playwrights who would go on to cut a swathe through London in the '90s.

He was heralded for the quiet power of his drama, which resulted in comparisons with Chekov. To this day it's difficult to ignore his influence on playwrights like Conor McPherson, whose similar quiet subtlety of tone, mood, and emphasis on lives lived in quiet desperation seems to have evolved organically from Roche's own work.

Roche followed Handful with Poor Beast in the Rain and Belfry, forming a triptych of plays centred on his home town which became the Wexford Trilogy.

While the Wexford Trilogy had gone down a storm in London, the three plays were met with a more cautious reception in his home country. It was only the opening of The Cavalcaders in 1993 that put paid to any accusations of Roche not being the real deal.

The play itself is a well rounded piece of work. It is his most structurally ambitious play, combining a crowd pleasing turn by the four principals, with infectious musical interludes, and a muscular narrative underpinned by Arthurian myth.

Opening in the apparent present, it examines the life of Terry, a man in late middle age who long ago lost his wife to his best friend Rogan. The play deals with Terry's self-destructive dalliance with a young girl called Nuala, betrayal, and the decline of community. It is shot through with Roche's typical bitter-sweet melancholy, and what he suggests is the paralysing force of nostalgia, a force he reckons "is not as bad as sentimentality" but which exerts a power nonetheless.

If viewed superficially as a play about a group of men in a small town working in a shoemakers who form a barbershop quartet, then The Cavalcadersmay now seem strangely anachronistic to some. But Roche is quick to counter any inevitable accusations of irrelevance, rejecting any implication that this play has nothing to say to an audience about a now more cosmopolitan Ireland. He laughs off any suggestion that it might be considered "a period piece now because we're setting it in the '90s". Instead he sticks to his own philosophy about the importance of universal themes, a philosophy that might well be considered hackneyed by some of the adherents of post modernism in his audience, but one which has served him well in the crafting of his work.

Instead Roche sees a very focused relevance in his drama:

"Like most serious playwrights I don't write a play for the here and now. I write a suit that you can wear for the rest of time. I think it's a rightly timeless play. I write in the gn�th caite, the continuous past. I believe Murphy writes in that too.

Banville writes in that tense. If you look at a play like Northern Lights by Stewart Parker you'll find that there's a stage direction that says this is set in the continuous past. Playwrights have always been aware of that tense. I've never seen any faxes, text messaging or mobile phones in Banville, Murphy or Friel."

Roche also sticks close to his creative values of crafting something which fuses the mythic and the everyday, or as he puts it "it's the everyday with a mythic backbone." For Roche this creates a sense of d�j� vu for his audience. "They don't quite know what, but they sense they've heard the story before. It helps make it bigger than the everyday, even though it may seem to be the everyday. Of course that's the difference between theatre and soap. Soap is strictly everyday."

As for criticism that the play might have nothing to say about modern Ireland, he champions the idea that it's a play that studies the human soul, and in Roche's book such stories of the soul never date. "Why are we still looking at Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller? Why are they so powerful? It's because they hook into archetypal universal themes and I believe there are universal themes."

When pushed on the play's relevance he agrees that The Cavalcadersmay in fact have been somewhat prescient, predicting as it does the breakdown of an old homogenous sense of community. There is a tension and anxiety in the play in Terry's bitter-sweet memories of the past, especially evident in his description of the local church "bursting at the seams, " and the community's pride in taking part in a mass specially written by Terry's uncle Eamon. Roche himself bemoans what he sees as the current lack of real mentors for young men, and is quite ready to admit that he does "mourn the loss of community." For him the play opens up in what he calls a "wasteland", in a place where old values have been eroded, and a man like Terry searches for something to hold on to.

But of course none of Roche's more lofty aims would hold substance unless founded on a dedication to craftsmanship.

Roche freely admits that he started to write out of frustration after the demise of his rock band in the late '70s. He quickly began to apply these frustrated energies towards musicality and rhythm in his dialogue - a feature which is probably the most complete aspect of his writing, evolving over the years into both a quiet lyricism and a rhythmic vitality which have become part of his trademark.

Even today, while speaking of writing, he lapses into musical similes to explain both the process and the character of his work, describing his search for metrical patterns in dialogue as a "search for the poetry of the beats" while his actors shape the "music" through their ensemble playing, stressing in the end that they must all harmonise with each other. His talk about his characters emphasises the investigation of stories and lives "lived in a minor key", and it's hard to imagine Roche writing the way he does without this musical sensibility.

All the while as he speaks he expresses this attention to craftsmanship with the kind of almost guileless and refreshing enthusiasm one would expect from a younger man.

Nor is he afraid to pepper his conversation with what might be viewed by more cynical observers as trite sentiments about things like the "fundamentals" of real life. For him the basic things always apply, as he says, "you love, you betray, you live, you die, you hurt.

All those things are still there."

Indeed The Cavalcaders itself examines the pain and hurt caused by betrayal. Although for him this pain is balanced by theatre's "healing quality", and there is no trace of shame or irony when he discusses this spiritual dimension, interestingly comparing it to "a high mass of some kind".

He claims not to be overtly political, instead he resolutely sticks to the everyday and seeks to write about lives that have "gone untapped", as he describes it. "Sometimes I find that I'm going to write a play about a big event about a guy climbing up a mountain, but I'll tend towards writing a play about the guy who carried his gear and stayed at base camp and watched him go up. I'll probably find that a deeper well at the end of the day."

It sums up perfectly the dramatic foundation of his work.

While other writers seem to have certain grandiose agendas, Roche seems to have a much more modest bent. A lot of the time he talks about writing in terms reminiscent of someone who has made it as a pop star, yet instead of all the abiding clich�s of 'making it' and 'reaching out to an audience', his vision, which some might accuse of being rather glib, has the colour of one who used to be a dreamer.

He even describes growing up in Wexford as he saw it: "a pop town, definitely not a c�il� town" and a place "that always thought it was bigger than it was", which fed into his own youthful ambitions to become a professional pop star, kickstarting the aspirations of someone who he admits "dreamed big".

It's the vision of a youthful rock-and-roll obsessed dreamer transplanted to the stuffy world of theatre, its ultimate expression culminating in his generous sentiment that "it's from your audience that you gain the new generation of writers. If some young person falls in love with the theatre I want that.

That's where it begins I think.

Making someone want to be up there, to be part of that."

He recoils at the contemporary urge to want to write for money, and sees the current quest by some to write pop songs purely for financial gain as something that runs counter to his belief in craftsmanship and love for what you do.

He also plays down the revival of The Cavalcaders at the Abbey (it's the first time any work of Roche's has appeared on the Abbey's main stage), viewed by some as a long overdue vindication of his contribution to the canon of Irish theatre. He stresses that his job as a playwright is rather simple, and reveals a certain generosity that lies at the heart of his ambitions as a writer: "I'd like to think that I move an audience, that I make them think a little bit. I wouldn't like someone to walk out of a play and never think about it again."

There's no bitterness when he talks about the critical pummelling taken by his last play On Such As We, and instead he says his ambition when writing it was to create "the most beautiful thing ever", and he laments the current climate we live in where people crave nothing more than soap opera. "They don't want aesthetics and beauty, they want blood on the walls and emotions laid bare. I'm not about that."

Talk then turns to Tony Doyle's son Joe, whom he taught the guitar to during The Cavalcaders' first run all those years ago, and again when he speaks there's that same pleasure in the performance of another, in the discovery of music and craftsmanship, the joy in aesthetics which could be the very backbone of his own theatrical oeuvre. He mentions that word again, "beauty", and you see he can't help himself, and he smiles.

'The Cavalcaders' opened yesterday, 14 April, at the Abbey Theatre