Autumn and witchcraft do seem to go together. Recar-born Pip Donaghy and experienced actor Oliver Cotton talk to Steve Pratt about reviving Arthur Miller's classic work The Crucible which plays Darlington's Civic Theatre next week.

TWO roles made Redcar-born actor Pip Donaghy wonder if his career was moving in the right direction. Wearing a tight frock and face mask, he played Queen Clytemnestra in the National Theatre's production of Greek tragedy The Oresteia. Then he played The Invisible Man in a BBC-TV series. His face wasn't seen in either show, leaving him to wonder, "Is this a message? Are they trying to tell me something?."

Happily, he will be seen at Darlington Civic Theatre in the touring production of Arthur Miller's classic drama The Crucible, set against the Salem witch trials in 1692.

He recalls appearing in the play before, when he was 23 and studying at the City Literary Institute before becoming an actor. He played the much older Reverend Hyde with a lot of ageing make-up.

The Crucible is what he calls a meat and three veg play - a good solid drama. "It's very personal and very political which is my favourite combination. It's about paranoia, superstition and hypocrisy - all the things you'll find in the office every day of the week," says Donaghy.

After growing up in Grangetown, where his father worked in the steelworks, he left to study maths at university. "I was the school freak, always top in maths," he recalls. "I joined the drama society at university because they were short of blokes and I caught the acting bug."

Although he has no relatives remaining in the area, he intends to visit Grangetown while he's back in the North-East to see what remains of his former home. His career has, by his own admission, been "fairly chaotic" with recent London theatre appearances in The Woman In Black and as the Inspector in An Inspector Calls. Working outside the capital is nothing new as he started this year touring to Australia and Brazil in 100 for Imaginary Theatre Company.

High points included playing a 1,200 seat theatre in Brazil where a simultaneous translation involved a woman at a laptop punching up lines on a screen as actors said them. "We even got the laughs in the same places," he says. In Australia, they battled the heat and "ferociously air-conditioned" venues in temperatures up to 39 degrees in Perth and Adelaide.

His favourite roles are Captain Boyle in Juno And The Paycock and Elyot Chase in Noel Coward's Private Lives. Playing in the ghost story The Woman In Black proved quite an experience too. "Sometimes it would be a full house of schoolgirls who'd all come saying, 'We've seen The Exorcist and won't be scared' and ended up screaming the place down," he says.

His daughters Emma and Bridie - who accompany him to our interview because he's looking after them at half-term- saw that production six times. He also has a three-year-old son, James. He met his wife Valerie, now a solicitor, at the National Theatre in a production of The Passion when he was playing Jesus and she was Eve.

LAST time Oliver Cotton appeared in The Crucible, he played the role, Reverend Parris, that Donaghy takes now. He stepped in as Deputy Governor Danforth, the judge investigating witchcraft in Salem, when Tony Britton dropped out of the current tour through a back injury. "Obviously you look at it from a completely different angle if you're playing a different part and it's with people you weren't with before," says Cotton.

"I wasn't looking to do it again but these things happen. Audiences really seem to love it. It's a very powerful play. There's no period in history its themes aren't important what with everything going on in the world."

Cotton has turned down theatre of late because the roles on offer didn't appeal. "Television and films are different because you may do something that's not a very high standard because they pay you money and it's over very quickly. In a play you have to choose very carefully because it involves a lot more time."

Cotton, who has worked extensively with the National Theatre and Royal Shakespeare Company, has been writing and making a short film. He's hoping he'll get to film another script he's written. One of his plays has already been staged in the US four years ago.

His time with the NT dates back to when Laurence Olivier was running the company. "You were working with the best directors and best casts," he says. "I loved working at the National because you can be in two or three things at a time and, unlike touring, you get nights off."

Cotton was in the very first season in the South Bank building, working under Olivier and then Peter Hall. At one point, he was appearing in eight different plays in the repertoire. "Sometimes I did two on the same day and there was one day I appeared in three," he says.

He's done his fair share of touring but it's not his favourite occupation. "If you're going to nice places, it can be great," says Cotton. "It's always interesting to take things to provincial audiences and I think there's a resurgence of theatre throughout England. It's amazing how much fantastic theatre is around. Great theatre doesn't just happen in London."

His work has been split more or less 50/50 between stage and film or TV (where I for one still fondly remember him from the BBC's much-maligned series The Borgias).

When he started out, most actors aspired to go into the theatre, to follow the likes of Olivier, Gielgud and Richardson. "Everyone's dream was to do leading parts at the National," he says. "You could get promoted through the ranks. That was a very different time. There's no parallel now because of the death of repertory theatre.

"I joined various companies for six months or a year and they were a great school. Now there aren't many places for young actors to go, apart from an episode of The Bill, if they're lucky."

* The Crucible: Darlington Civic Theatre from November 16-20. Tickets (01325) 486555.

Published: 11/11/2004