Bowles of ire

IN many ways Peter Bowles is the ideal actor to star in a play called The Unexpected Man having moved from stock baddie obscurity at the age of 43 to become a household name in BBC sitcom To The Manor Born. The role of handsome, monied Richard De Vere opened up offers of further TV sitcoms while the actor cleverly avoided being typecast by devising his own TV drama series, Lytton's Diary.

As a West End show regular, Bowles' opportunities to tour plays to the regions are quite rare. His last visit to the North-East was in Sleuth at Newcastle's Theatre Royal back in 1999, so Darlington's Civic Theatre must be particularly pleased to have landed the popular actor in The Unexpected Man by Yasmine Reza, of Art fame.

The one-act plot of two strangers, who meet on a train journey, arrives at the birthplace of the passenger railway service next week, Tuesday-Saturday.

The two-hander, which also stars Sian Phillips, is full of dramatic tension and stirrings of romance although the two characters don't talk to each other until the end.

Bowles explains: "This is a beautifully written piece and I thought I had to do it really. It's very challenging and very difficult because I talk to myself the whole time."

So is he a man for monologues?

"I like talking to the audience, but in this I don't talk to them and this is really random thoughts to myself, which is incredibly difficult to do because there's no prompting. Nobody is asking you if you'd like a gin and tonic, it's as if you're in bed at night and these odd thoughts are coming into your head. Although there is another person on stage I don't pay any attention to her at all until the end.

"Sian's character has an imaginary dialogue with me, but my dialogue is all with myself. Yasmina Reza's script, translated by Christopher Hampton, is a joy to say, providing you remember it."

Another thing that attracted him to The Unexpected Man was that the play lasts just one hour and 20 minutes, with no interval.

"I thought I was going to do it sitting down the whole time, but I missed out on that one because I don't. After doing six months in The Old Masters (in the West End), which was really very hard work and a demanding role, this sounded rather good because I though I was going to be sitting down in a play that doesn't last for three hours. But it's not worked out like that."

Is the play's length about right to hold the audience's attention?

"Yes it is providing people keep their clothes on. The plot exists in the minds of the audience. They know what's going on, but neither of the characters know what's going on. She's read all my books and she thinks I'm wonderful and sort of in love with me. I am a very famous author like Graham Greene and I think I'm a failure and I'm raging against the dying of the light. Both of us are getting on a bit and I'm lacerating myself mentally on the inside, but on the outside I'm cool, calm and collected. The audience knows this, but I don't know there is a woman who can help me with everything I'm worried about, but the audience knows."

The 68-year-old jokes semi-seriously about far too aware of the ghosts of failure, desperation and insomnia haunting his author Paul but rapidly retreats from any hint of concern by declaring: "I can do all the things as far as I know that I used to, but I haven't got as much hair."

The public's interest in Bowles' back catalogue of TV work now extends to The Avengers, The Prisoner and The Persuaders as well as To The Manor Born. He says: "It's very nice that people are watching all these programmes and I get a lot of letters from young people now and questions in the street too because they are very excited that I've been in things like The Avengers."

THE fear of being typecast as Richard De Vere drove Bowles into creating another character for a drama series about a newspaper columnist called Lytton's Diary which he sold to ITV.

He says: "I very much gained an insight into the world of journalism because I became a good friend of Ray Connolly (Evening Standard columnist and film-maker) and Nigel Dempster (the Daily Mail gossip columnist) and for a week I sat in and went everywhere with Nigel. I was actually present when a very well-known person phoned the gossip column himself, so it was a man which means I've given something away, and gave some juicy quotes anonymously about himself and when it was printed he threatened to sue. When I talked to Nigel about this he said 'oh that's not unusual at all'.

"I personally don't think that newspapers do hound celebrities unfairly. All I know is that if the situation between newspapers and celebrities was at the state of hysteria it is at the moment when I did To The Manor Born, which was getting 23 million viewers, I can't imagine what Penny (Keith) and I would have gone through. It would have been extraordinary.

"The interest in me was nice and welcoming, but a bit maddening for my wife when she came out with me at the time. Today it would be terrible."

So does the media ever rummage about in his past looking for juicy gossip?

"Oh I do hope so because I'd like to see it myself. I'm not sure what they could root around and find, so it would have to be something I've forgotten. The Paparazzi don't really bother me because if I go down the road for pint of milk or a newspaper without my make-up I look just the same because I don't wear make-up, but its these ladies like Joan Collins who end up being talked about in the newspapers,"

Several projects lie ahead. He's just finished an autumn ITV series, starring with Robert Lindsay, called Jericho where he plays the head of the underworld in Soho and Mayfair.

"It's a chance for the TV audience to see what I used to do before they were born, which is to play villains. It's a very good part. He's the nemesis of Lindsay's character who is a little like Fabian Of the Yard from the 1950s.

"I love playing villains, I adore playing them," enthuses the actor who may finally be about to shake off his heroic TV halo.

* The Unexpected Man plays Darlington Civic Theatre, Tuesday-Saturday. Box Office: (01325) 486 555.

Published: 02/06/2005