When it comes to staging her plays, Yasmina Reza, one of the world's most successful playwrights, leaves nothing to chance. She vets the actors, dissects the directors and prods the producers. It's a way of working that she first devised more than 20 years ago when she wrote her first play, Conversations After a Burial , and continues with her latest , God of Carnage .

"I was an actress, you see, I knew bad actors would have spoiled what I'd written," says Reza, a delicate- boned 48-year-old, with large expressive brown eyes. "I write for virtuosos, otherwise what's the point?"