WHEN I catch up with Kate Mulvaney by phone to Adelaide, she’s in the last stage of rehearsals for the play “Thursday”, coming soon to the Canberra Playhouse.

Mulvaney, last seen here playing Lady Macbeth for Bell Shakespeare, is an award-winning playwright, but here she is an actor, in a play with a searing real-life background.

Centred on Rose, the character Mulvaney plays, the production follows the story of Gill Hicks, the Australian who survived the London Underground bombings of 2005, but lost both her legs.

This production is a coup for the director of Adelaide’s Brink Productions, whose director Chris Drummond sealed a deal with the hosting company English Touring Theatre and top British playwright Bryony Lavery to create a play dealing in some way with the London bombings.

Lavery is “top of the crop”, Mulvaney says and the resulting play is a piece of classic construction, starting when the alarm clock goes off on the first day, July 7, 2005, and finishing a year later when the survivors of the bombing meet at the Tube station for two-minutes silence.

“We watch people being people,” Mulvaney says, “and see people getting up having breakfast, having to go to the toilet… it’s a reminder of stuff that we will do – and that it can get taken away in a moment.”

It is well known that Mulvaney has suffered a life-threatening health condition, but she doesn’t think that influenced Drummond in casting her.

“People may draw similarities,” she says, “but I think it was because I did a good audition. I wanted the part and I fought hard for it.”

She loves Rose, who is exuberant, annoyingly ambitious, an Aussie woman who feels trapped in London and who loses both her legs just an hour after we meet her. “She’s sitting there on a train, a woman with no legs – she has to make a choice at that moment.”

Will she decide to go on? Will she keep her drive?

“I guess we’ll leave that up to the audience,” Mulvaney suggests, “Bryony asks the audience, ‘you make up your minds – would you choose life?’”

“Thursday,” by Bryony Lavery, at The Playhouse, March 20-23. Bookings to 6275 2700 or canberratheatrecentre.com.au