Greg Hicks explains how he's learning to cope with becoming the most hated character on stage.

GREG Hicks admits he couldn't wait to play one of theatre's great contemporary anti-heroes, who takes seven hours to die. The 53-year-old says of the epic play Angels In America, which comes to Newcastle's Northern Stagel next week,: "This play is written about America in the late 80s when aids hit the world. It's about the difficulties of confronting the truth of who you are and was essentially billed as a gay fantasia. The play examines people's inability to face the truth of who they are against the backdrop of one of the worst diseases of the 20th century, apart from cancer, and American right-wing republican politics..

"I play a vicious right-wing republican lawyer called Roy Cohn who did actually exist. He worked for McCarthy in the witch-hunts of the 1950s and was single-handedly responsible for sending to the electric chair a middle-aged couple called Rosenberg," explains Greg.

Tony Kushner's landmark mammoth, New York-set, two-part project - Part 1: Millennium Approaches lasts three-and-a-half hours and it runs for seven hours over two performances - features Cohn as a self-hating, power-hungry hypocrite haunted by the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg as he's dying.

Royal Shakespeare Company stalwart Greg, who has marked the last four years with award-winning title roles in Coriolanus and Macbeth, says: "I spend most of the play dying, in fact all of the play dying and eventually die. However, the grimness of the play is off-set by the most brilliant humour, wit and in-sight and warmth.

"All the characters, apart from Roy Cohn, have an emotional relationship with the audience. My character denies his homosexuality from the word go and always did. His obituary was that he died of liver cancer, but he died of aids. Yet he was viciously anti-gay in his politics."

The huge investment required in Angels In America means that the award-winning work is rarely performed, but Greg is rightly pleased that audiences at Glasgow's Citizens Theatre are giving the production a five-star rating in a run which lasts until tonight before transferring to Newcastle.

"Daniel Cramer (director) is probably the only person on the planet who could possibly do this play justice. It stands up not as a play specific to the 80s but as a play specific to all time. That's why it's regarded as one of the great contemporary classics of the 20th Century," he explains.

Greg jokes that it was a five-minute meeting with Daniel Cramer which led to an invitation to him to play Roy Cohn "even though I don't think I read the speech he gave me very well".

Of his portrayal of Cohn, Greg adds: "He's more vicious than any character I've ever played and that includes Tamburlaine, Coriolanus and Macbeth and if you can get anything more vicious than Macbeth they you're going some." He's found that his character's only redeeming qualities are brilliant intelligence, being ruthlessly direct and "fabulously politically incorrect". "I'm still learning to like the man and, so far, I don't think I'd have him round for dinner, but I'm trying to negotiate some lunch dates with him. He was an extraordinary man, but deeply hated."

He agrees that being the villain is always a gifted part in a play "although this guy makes Attila The Hun look like a parish priest".

Leicester-born Greg has an on-going love affair with Newcastle because of the many tours he's made to the city with the RSC. "For me coming to Newcastle is a real treat, I did the very first RSC season (going back 30 years) there and it's like a second venue to me. Glasgow and Newcastle are very close to my performing heart."

He describes Angels as a stonking play ideal for the new-look Northern Stage and unlikely to return for many years.

Does it worry him that he's up against his old employers, the RSC, who are opening his most successful play Coriolanus, starring an old mate William Houston, at Newcastle Theatre Royal the same night?

"Oh my God. How weird is that. Gosh, I don't know how that makes me feel. Sadly, or gladly, I won't be able to attend," he says, bursting into laughter.

"I don't know which comes first, gladly or sadly. How ironic."