AT the launch of Live Theatre’s new season, artistic director Max Roberts joked that much of the past two years seemed to have been dedicated to “old blokes”.

This, he added quickly, had been fantastic. The Pitmen Painters – written by a not-that-old Lee Hall – had earned Live a great deal of money and acclaim.

Following on its heels – indeed overlapping with it – comes the revival (actually, updating) of the late Alan Plater’s musical, Close the Coalhouse Door, a co-production with Northern Stage which is to be directed by Sam West.

But the thrust of Max’s speech concerned not an old – or even an oldish or sadly departed – bloke but a young woman called Zoe Cooper whose first full-length play, Nativities, opens at the little Newcastle Quayside theatre later this month.

“She’s an incredibly talented writer and I’m so glad Gez (Casey, Live’s literary manager) and his team have been able to find this new talent,” he said.

“It is nice for me to be reminded exactly what it is that makes me want to direct plays.

“It’s finding a new play that makes me think, ‘Oh, yes, I can see that – and I can see exactly how to do this play’.”

Live Theatre has always punched above its weight, helping to launch the careers of Lee Hall and also Peter Straughan, nominated for an Oscar for his work on Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and the writer of a previous Live/Northern Stage co-production called Noir – before the film world claimed him.

Now it is giving Zoe the Live treatment with a five-strong North East cast of Melanie Hill, Chris Connel, Laura Norton and newcomers Sam Neale and Paul Woodson.

Zoe is not from the North East. She tells me she is originally from Stockport but grew up in London.

She studied English at Cambridge University and then did a masters degree in play writing at Birmingham University where she was taught by the noted playwright David Edgar.

The daughter of an actress (Jenny Howe), she has “worked in theatre in London and around the South, mainly as literary officer or dramaturg, helping other people to write their plays”.

To get her own play on stage she came to the North East, arousing the interest of Max and Gez in 2010 at Live Theatre’s new writing festival, Different Stages.

They commissioned her to write the play which is now taking shape in rehearsal.

Nativities is not an overtly religious play. In fact, it is set in a call centre in the North East.