It's been a slow-burn but Robert Pickavance is finally getting his chance to play a radical Russian poet who's been haunting him for some time. Steve Pratt reports.

LITTLE did Robert Pickavance realise when presented with an early draft of new play, A Cloud In Trousers, that five years later he'd be appearing in the world premiere production.

He has his good friends, writer Steve Trafford and his actress partner Elizabeth Mansfield, to thank for that. Since showing him that early draft, he's seen the play go through various stages. As a result, there was a "collective assumption" that he'd take the role of Osip Brik, intellectual thinker, editor and critic in Russia as the revolution unfolded.

Together with his wife Lili, a feminist and political activist, and poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, they set up an impassioned menage a trois - the basis for the play by Trafford, who's written TV dramas including The Bill, Midsomer Murders and Between The Lines.

"They sent me the first script and asked, 'What do you think?'," recalls Pickavance. "It was part of the process of Steve's writing but there was not any sense it was soon to go into production. Over the years I've been aware of it.

"Coincidentally, I live in Leeds and when I do tellys in London there are generous friends who say, 'You must come and stay with us'. Over those five years it's been, 'How is A Cloud In Trousers coming on?'. It's been on a very low boil."

Pickavance was caught on the hop when the project finally got the green light from York Theatre Royal as the lack of urgency with the slow-burning project meant he'd kept putting off doing research.

"When I've played historical characters in the past, I crammed reading about them into every spare moment. When I played Lytton Strachey I was performing King Arthur in a huge epic in Edinburgh but read everything I could about him. All the information was piling around me and feeding the imagination for something I was going to do.

"A Cloud In Trousers has been going on for so long I've never got around to reading up. This summer, when I thought I was going to have the decks cleared for that, I was asked to do a great number of radio plays and workshops in a short time. And when I finally located the book I needed in Leeds library, it was one I couldn't take out so I couldn't use it. So, although the text and general world is familiar, I started work absolutely naked, without any research done."

Mayakovsky, celebrated as the greatest Russian poet of the 20th century, sets up house with Lili and Osip in what the actor describes as "a fulcrum of passion and political ideas", adding: "It sounds worthy, but is very funny."

He hasn't performed in Trafford's work before and, in rehearsals, didn't find that his friendship with the writer and Mansfield (who plays Lili) proved a problem. "It works extremely well," he reports. "They are very good friends and very good colleagues. We do have a history that goes back some way as collaborators. We are more than friends who've been brought together by our work."

York is a second home to him, as he went to university in the city and has appeared in Theatre Royal productions including Romeo And Juliet, Neville's Island, Road and Educating Rita.

"In the past I've gone anywhere and everywhere to work if it sounded good, but as I'm also married with four children I began to think, 'This is crazy, my life is a completely disorganised mess. It's completely broken up to being away from home and not living with my children'. I decided I'd do everything I could to work much closer to home," he explains.

His children, aged 14 to 21, have shown no signs of wanting to follow him into acting. His own entry was prompted by a teacher telling him he was good enough to be a professional actor, but he hesitated, studying history at York and then taking a doctorate at Oxford.

While there, in his fourth year, he became curator at a group of medieval buildings near Oxford. One had been converted to a small theatre and a visiting company, an unfunded fringe company from Leeds called Pocket Theatre, invited him to be its manager.

"I ran off to Leeds with them. But as soon as I joined, someone who was going to work with them couldn't do it and they asked me if I'd take over," he says. "Having done that, I knew exactly why I had joined the theatre company - I wanted to act."

Pickavance decided against drama school, having already been a student for seven years. But his studies, which made him an expert at reading medieval and Elizabethan handwriting, helped him through lean times as an actor. A man researching his family history would send him photocopies of papers for Pickavance to read. "Often when I was wondering where the next meal was going to come from, a package of photocopies would arrive to be read," he says.

* A Cloud In Trousers runs at York Theatre Royal Studio until October 23. Tickets (01904) 623568.

Published: 04/10/2004