TWO questions loom over the latest stage version of Antony and Cleopatra like Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor with after-party hangovers. Why is the Royal Shakespeare Company presenting another revival so soon after the Alan Bates-Frances De la Tour production came to Newcastle in 1999? And, secondly, was any thought given to the latest Cleo, Sinead Cusack, starring in the play opposite her famous actor-husband Jeremy Irons?

The man eventually cast in the part was Hollywood bad guy Stuart Wilson. The British actor is enjoying a purple patch as a film heavy in blockbusters like Enemy Of The State, The Mask of Zorro, Lethal Weapon 3 and, sadly, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 3.

"My kids are used to me disappearing for chunks of time or I'm with them a lot," he says. "They see the poster for this one and say 'urrgh, dad's kissing another woman'. I've got twins of seven and a 12-year-old and none of them, thank Christ, show signs of doing what I do."

Following their opening performances at Stratford-upon-Avon, Cusack and Wilson talk about their preparations for the Tyneside season. Wilson teases Cusack mercilessly about being well down the list of her choice of leading men.

"She's very famous," he says. "She had to have a look around to find out who would be able to deal with her, and right at the bottom of the pile there was me. I've been out of the country for ten years and haven't been to Stratford for 20 years. I came back because I was on Sinead's list."

Cusack, laughing, denies it: "Oh please, he was very high at the top of the list from the start. The only reason I was in the frame first was I'd been recently with the company."

"Seriously" adds Wilson, "I was phoned up in Puerto Rico and I was asked if I'd like to do it and I was flattered because I haven't been here for a long time. I'd done the RSC a long time back. I was in Puerto Rico making a film called Heart of Stone, which will probably make it to the Tesco video shop, although the director has lugged it down to Cannes, mad German fool that he is. I actually haven't seen the end result and it was looking rather better at that time."

With a dad in the RAF, Guildford-born Wilson livedin the African countries that became Zimbabwe and Zambia until he was 18. Back in his early RSC days, he did a North-East tour as Hotspur. "If it was an obscure place, we played it," he says.

Cusack is a third generation actor with famous acting parents and sisters, but says it's not always a benefit starring together with family. Sometimes husband and wife teams can work, "but it depends on the personality of the husband and wife. Sometimes that colour of domestic baggage is immensely useful such as in The Three Sisters with my siblings". (Her sisters are Catherine, Sorcha and Niamh.) "On the other hand, I did a film with Jeremy called Waterland and a play here at Stratford called The Rover where our relationship did get in the way."

Her character was a woman jilted by Irons, who played The Rover, and Cusack admits there were times she could have kicked the father of her two sons, Sam, 23, and Max, 16.

Cusack's entry into the profession survived an inauspicious start at Ireland's famous Abbey Theatre. She confesses: "At the opening of the new Abbey Theatre every glitterati was there and I had this line playing Everyman saying 'look at that couple in the punt over there' and I put a "c" in the wrong place on the opening night. I was flung out of there three months later. Mine was not a stellar career at the Abbey Theatre in pretty well any respect."

She went on to regularly collect best actress awards and has an enviable track record in theatre, film and TV. Her importance to the RSC has seen her appointed to the company's board as the first-ever acting representative.

As an RSC Associate Actor, she quickly lost any reservations about playing one of the world's all-time sex sirens and says: "There are some plays that you couldn't do too often like Titus Andronicus, but Antony and Cleopatra is a very popular Shakespeare play.

"I had been asked to play it a couple of times and always said no because I didn't feel I could cope with her actually. She's extremely baffling, very confusing, very complex and very difficult. I think the most difficult element for me about Cleopatra is that their love affair is in the past. The action of the play really starts with the news of Antony's wife's death. And then the whole edifice starts to crumble and their love affair becomes fraught with incredible difficulties."

"You're catching them in decline," adds Wilson. "It doesn't mean they're not passionate about each other, but it's on the way down and on the way out. Sinead wanted to do it for a long time."

Cusack is fascinated by Shakespeare's vision of two lovers "often quarrelsome and irritable and adolescent at times. They play games with each other even up to his death."

"It's an unusual play because Antony dies, in uncut versions, in the region of half-an-hour prior to the end and, joking aside, actors sometimes don't like that. Normally, the two main characters go out together in tragedy. In this, it's a very strange, rather sophisticated structure, but it's one of the great parts."

However, Cusack went too far when she asked the RSC to supply a real asp for her death scene. She laughs and replies: "I got a four-page memo from the RSC as to why I could not have a real asp. The reasons you can't have one are: they fall asleep, they bite, they crap and they go missing, and the RSC thought that any or all of those reasons would be sufficient to put me off. It might also be to do with economics because animal handlers are extremely expensive and they get paid more than actors. I did want a real asp."

On the use of a rubber asp she says: "So far, touch wood, I haven't had a laugh which is wonderful. I used to get a lot of laughs when I was killing myself as Juliet so I must be getting better."