If Barrie Rutter didn't exist, Keith Waterhouse would have to have created him.

As blunt as a well-worn Sheffield Steel knife, he stands defiantly atop his small but influential theatrical empire. His is an uncompromising message: "We're from t'North. If tha' dun't like it - tough."

The difference between Rutter and some fictitious Yorkshire pudding of Waterhouse's invention is an abiding interest in the theatrical classics. His desire to give an authentic Yorkshire voice to some of the stage's oldest works has given birth to the Northern Broadsides company and taken him from a four-performance experiment at Salt's Mill to the National Theatre, and now, back again.

"There's a sweet circularity that we're coming back," he says of his current production, Tony Harrison's The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus, which opens at the West Yorkshire Playhouse next Thursday. This account of the tracking down, in 1907, of a lost Satyr play by Sophocles, was the very piece premiered by Rutter in Saltaire, en route to London.

"It was in Salt's that I got the idea to do a full classical play with a cast born in the North and with a voice firmly rooted in the North," he says. "That's how Northern Broadsides was born. It's nice now to have a full run at the play."

The northern voice to which he refers is not, he insists, solely a matter of dialect. "I've never used the words dialect or accent - it's not about that. It's about a rootedness, an energy, a percussiveness which comes from the limestone and granite of this area and it's about that rhythmic tune in the voice for which this area is known. When you turn that up for the stage it comes out even more strongly."

Rutter, who directs and appears in this production of Trackers, is on a self-appointed crusade to lay claim, on the North's behalf, to the classics.

"Our classic plays are not to be appropriated by those who have a Received Pronunciation voice, he says, hackles up. "There is a superior attitude that goes with a superiority of voice - but people without 'refined' voices have just as much to do with culture. Knowledge knows no accent or dialect boundaries.

"We don't balk at a Scots voice or an Irish one, but somehow, a non-correct English voice coming out with Sophocles seems to upset a lot of people. To hell with them, I say."

A few southerners, he admits, did not care for Trackers' implied message of class superiority, when they saw it at the National in 1990. He is unrepentant. "It's still out there, that superior attitude in this country, which is to do with people being kept away from a culture of which they are part."

Bolstered by the recent success of his northern tours (venues have famously included such non-standard stages as Skipton Cattle Mart), Rutter is now planning to go on the road with King Lear and with a new play commissioned from the comedian Mike Harding about the onward life of Lear's Fool.

"The Fool turns up somewhere and discusses the nature of comedy," says Rutter. "We call Jim Davidson a comedian and we call Lenny Bruce a comedian. Some wouldn't - including Mike Harding. We might do it as a companion piece to Lear."

To mark the Millennium, on January 1, 2000, Northern Broadsides will perform the full cycle of Tony Harrison's mystery plays. Funding, however, remains a problem.

"We're granted money on a per-project basis," says Rutter. "But I've got to be hopeful about that side of things. Otherwise it's just abject bloody misery."

David Behrens

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.