Interviewing Blanche McIntyre – one Saturday evening in late August – feels like a first date. We’ve known each other for 12 years, since university, where she directed me in Hamlet and Tom Stoppard’s The Invention of Love. We’ve faced enraged harpists storming an Edinburgh stage when we exceeded our allotted slot during the Fringe Festival, in 2000; and, as Hamlet, my over-enthusiastic whirling of an antique sword during the Arras scene necessitated some emergency plastering of the theatre walls by her parents on opening night. Like most friendships, ours has evolved in fragments, stretched out over time and through change. So, rewinding McIntyre’s professional life as a director, boxing it into a set of questions and turning on the dictaphone that lies between us is new and strangely exhilarating.

This is, of course, an excellent point at which to talk to McIntyre about her career, which has gone from strength to strength since she won the inaugural Leverhulme Bursary for Emerging Theatre Directors in 2009. Following an attachment at the National Theatre Studio, where she was director in residence, she staged a well-received production of Bulgakov’s Moliere or The League of Hypocrites at the Finborough. In 2010, she took another step up when theatrical heavyweight Max Stafford-Clark chose her to be associate director on Richard Bean’s dark new comedy about the IRA in America, The Big Fellah; first at the Lyric Hammersmith and then on tour.

But arguably McIntyre’s biggest breakthrough came this February, with a revival of Emlyn Williams’s Accolade at the Finborough. Her production of this engrossing tale of celebrity double-life, unseen for five decades, had critics falling over themselves to praise it as career-making. With characteristic modesty, McIntyre insists that this hasn’t had any lasting effect. However, her hope that “it’ll stand as a calling card for the next few years” is already being borne out by laudatory references to it in listings for her next London-based production – a revival of Christopher Hampton’s first play, When Did You Last See My Mother?, about a bisexual love triangle, which opens at Trafalgar Studios tonight. For McIntyre, the continued acclaim is “exciting but also terrifying, because I have to live up to it with this one.”

Tom Wicker and Blanche McIntyre at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2000.

McIntyre comes from a literary background that goes back several generations. Her grandfather was a poet who hung out with Empson and Larkin and her parents worked in publishing (her mother, Helen Fraser, was managing director of Penguin UK until 2009). Given this heritage, why did she opt for the stage rather than the page? “That’s an interesting question”, she replies thoughtfully. “I was an avid reader until I was 11 or 12, but then I completely dropped it. Probably because I began to associate it with English lessons and essay writing: analysing why Jane Austen is funny, and all that rubbish. The books I’d read when I was 6 or 7 were an Alice in Wonderland-style door into a completely immersive world. So I suppose what I was trying to create when I got into theatre was a real-life version of this – emotion in the moment.”