Robert Lindsay, I couldn't help feeling, was not having fun.

"We'll get this over quickly," I tell him, as if I am preparing to extract one of his teeth, perhaps; not merely to interview him.

"No, no, I'm fine," he insists, in the tone of someone trying to convince himself that he really is fine. "I've got a cup of tea, I've got Deborah applying make-up to my face and I'm ready to go."

If he is stressed, it is not simply because he is being made up for a photograph session as we speak. It is because since making his debut with the Royal Shakespeare Company, he has had to suffer the slings and arrows of the most outrageous criticism - not so much for his performance as the barbarous Richard III, as for his supposed petulance towards those Shakespearean purists among the Stratford critics.

"I've been misquoted so many times now," says the star of Citizen Smith, Hornblower and too many other TV shows to mention, as Deborah bobs and weaves around him. "People say I'm griping about critics, that I'm griping about Stratford audiences - and I'm not."

Yet there is no doubt that the affair has got to him. "I just find the whole experience extremely different," he says. "And I do think there is a north-south divide. Quite obviously."

For this reason he will be both pleased and relieved next week, when Richard III arrives at Bradford's Alhambra.

"The audiences' expectations in the north are that they've come to see Richard III, they've come to see the Royal Shakespeare Company, they've come to see Robert Lindsay, and they're going to have a good time. They're not sitting there going, 'Come on, entertain me'. And they're not going with a preconceived idea of the text."

This theory was given added weight last month, when audiences in Sheffield gave the show standing ovations, night after night. "They came for the enjoyment of it, the thrill of it," says Lindsay. "And they allowed the show to happen for them.

"But it's been different in every town. We're in Woking now, which is a satellite of London, and it's very quiet. Consequently, a lot of the laughs have gone. I think they feel that they shouldn't laugh at Shakespeare. They expect it to be done in a certain way, almost reverentially sometimes. And this isn't."

This willingness to laugh or not is at the root of Lindsay's run-in with the theatrical purists.

"I always said that when I did Richard I'd make it accessible," he says. "It's a very dense play, notoriously difficult to get the pageantry and the history across.

"I had two ideas: that he was a Yorkshireman and proud of it - I'd read that in the history books - and that his crimes were born of his resentment and loathing of women. I'm sounding like an amateur psychologist now, but I think that was at the root of what Shakespeare was trying to portray."

The result, he says, is a production which first-time Shakespeare audiences can understand at once. "They don't have to turn round to each other and say, 'What was that? Where are we?'

"Some people say we're kow-towing down to the less intelligent. I don't think that's true."

The current provincial tour ("hard work," says Lindsay, referring as much to the suitcases and hotel rooms as to the southern audiences) will culminate in a ten-week run at London's Savoy Theatre.

But his heart, he insists, is here in the north. "I have an affinity with people in the north. I like them; I trust them. It sounds clichd that one can make rash generalisations, but from my heart that is absolutely true.

"That applies to the audiences as well. It's got nothing to do with intelligence, but that's what they always put it down to. It's to do with simple appreciation. In the south of England, there's a middle-class snob value."

Lindsay's roots are not in the north as we know it but in Nottinghamshire. "Neither here not there," his father used to say.

His work has sometimes been fiercely northern - not least his portrayal of the demonic Liverpool council leader Michael Murray in Alan Bleasdale's GBH - but in the theatre, ironically, it is for pie-and-mash roles in smash musicals like Oliver! and Me and My Girl for which he is best known.

"The time had never been right to work with the RSC before now," he says. "I had an extraordinary TV career which just went from one thing to another to another and it's sometimes difficult to let that go and to make the leap back into theatre.

"I chose to go and work at the Royal Exchange in Manchester. I did Hamlet there, and King Lear, but it doesn't have the profile that the RSC has."

Quite how he will look back on his current spell with the RSC remains to be seen. There must be rewards, I suggest, as Deborah applies his wig and the photographer's assistant calls him away.

"Those standing ovations in Sheffield - that's what you do it for," he says. "Audience appreciation. If audiences are prepared to give it, it makes everything else worthwhile."

l The Royal Shakespeare Company's production of Richard III is at the Alhambra from Tuesday to Saturday. Tickets are bookable on 01274 752000.

David Behrens

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