FIRTH AMONG EQUALS

Bored to the tip of your little toe with Shakespeare? Theatreland is awash with a surfeit of Hamlets, King Lears and Macbeths. Even if this conser vatism exists because of a perceived absence of innovative, surprising or risk- taking new work, it's not as though there aren't alternatives in the vast international library of long-lost dramatic labours.

Enter Alexander Griboyedov's 1820s satire Gore Ot Uma, a play so ingrained in the Russian consciousness that its words have infiltrated everyday proverbial chit-chat. It has seen little exposure on the British stage, however; but now there's finally an English verse translation, courtesy of Anthony (Clockwork Orange) Burgess, and a new production with Colin Firth as the fervent, free-thinking hero Chatsky. "Virgin territory and classic theatre all in one," is the actor's description.

Firth, articulate, analytical and unpretentious, warmly welcomes the break with the British play-safe mentality. "We are so insular, so smug about our own theatre tradition. Europe has a wealth of theatre from the last century which no one bothers with. Writers like Arthur Schnitzler, for example, are neglected here. It's a waste. It sounds precocious, but I feel that Shakespeare should be put away for ten years. "They are irresistible plays, but we are stuck in a terrible groove just focusing on one resource. If we did take a break, we could come back and give it some freshness." This critique is spoilt somewhat, though, when he admits that he fancies a stab at the Prince of Denmark himself.

On top of the Hamlet similarities, Chatsky's oppositional 'outsider' status also echoes back to Firth's Lenin-loving - and name-making - role in Another Country a decade ago. His career has been a steady notching-up of choice parts, and he has proved particularly proficient at conveying inner depth of feeling. Pinter's The Caretaker was his last, much-lauded, stage venture, though Firth is equally excited and challenged by his latest characterisation. The fruits of film and TV work in the last two years meant only a measured hesitation about signing up for the Equity minimum for three months (the production tours after its run at the Almeida). "Sometimes, something gets under your skin to the extent that you just can't feel comfortable with yourself if you don't do it."

Both Chatsky's form and content appealed. "To translate this into couplets a lot of people would regard as almost impossible. And Burgess has done it with incredible audacity and conviction. I'm helpless unless I have some decent language to speak. When the script's crap, I can't move a muscle. This is going to get into 'luvvies' now.... but that's how it is. I just couldn't resist the language. Also I found it funny. And I love the Almeida. It's the most fertile theatre in London that I know." Classically high-brow, high quality and highly bankable, it won't be the Almeida that's the fount of the cultural revolution, though. "They don't get right to the cutting-edge of things, but they do take certain risks."

Unlike many actors who play down politics in the interests of jolly ol' entertainment, Firth, a disenchanted Labour thinker (the party's backing for the Gulf war precipitating the divorce), needs no prompting about his close affinity with Chatsky's assault on petit-bourgeois Moscow society and the play's relevance to Thatcher's legacy here. "It has a colossal resonance now because it is also dealing with a Philistine society, where everything's to do with vying for position and not aiming your sights too high except financially. People are deeply threatened by the imagination, and anybody who challenges the orthodoxy is considered dangerous and, in this case, mad. It's the same as the 'loony' Left label."

Passionate idealism doesn't sit easily with British restraint, making Chatsky an especially European personality. Even in Russia, though, where the play was banned until the 1860s, it has been produced either with the emphasis on the love element or with the emphasis on the politics. "I'm finding out that they are inseparable, and that's a very un-English thing as well: the man's passionate love for somebody [Sofia, played by Jemma Redgrave] and his political ideals are all the same thing; it's how he wants the world to be."

Firth seems to relish a spot of cerebral stirring. Controversy certainly snowed on Tumbledown, the BBC's knife-sharpening Falklands drama with Firth as the paraplegic paratrooper Robert Lawrence, although the actor confesses that when the self-righteous would-be censors exploded, "I had the good fortune to be in Argentina doing something else!" Last year, though, he was embroiled in another fuss when Beirut hostage John McCarthy expressed his disapproval of Granada TV's drama about his years in captivity. Is Firth, who played the kidnapped journalist, concerned about courting this kind of reception?

"No, it's rather exciting. It's what drives us, to see if you can make some ripples - if you believe in it. Hostages was more of a morally grey area, but I still feel in support of doing it. If you render that inappropriate, then you also have to render all reporting of anything the public knows about inappropriate. Interestingly, after all the furore here, when it was put out in America recently, the American hostages Terry Anderson and Tom Sutherland loved it."

With the home-grown film industry under turf, talk of Tinseltown has whistled round the watering-holes of showbiz hacks, but Firth doesn't appear unduly starry-eyed - not that any cool customer would, of course. "It's not an option I take that seriously, partly because they're not that interested in me. I've spent very little time there. I read once in
Today newspaper that I'd been there for about five years 'sniffing for a break like Jeremy Irons' or something, which really pissed me off. 'Colin Firth with the bright red freckles,' it said. Hot research! The one or two things I have been offered have been so fatuous I couldn't have done them even just for my own ego."

Firth will next be seen in The Hour of the Pig, a BBC big-screen film in which he plays a reforming lawyer in fifteenth-century France, where a large boar is had up in the dock for murdering a child. Beyond that, he says, the future is "looking good". In the meantime, while Chatsky is unlikely to provoke more than a tickling of the brain cells, at least it isn't Shakespeare; at least they tried.

* * *