A serious business

What I'd really like,' says Adrian Lester, 'is to do a farce. A sitcom. Something comic, anyway. I'm actually quite funny. Instead, I keep getting cast in tragedies.'

Phew. What a relief. Lester has cultivated such a formidable stage presence that the prospect of meeting him was a little daunting. However, it transpires, this talented actor is desperate to discover his inner Ray Cooney. Or try his hand at Friends.

Instead, he's playing Henry V in Nicholas Hytner's debut production as artistic director of the National Theatre, in the Olivier of all places. (It's also the first in Hytner's Travelex £10 season, which makes two-thirds of all tickets available for just £10.)

It's a great role and, of course, Lester knows it. A tricky play to do, however, in modern times, with its portrait of a young king rallying the troops and invading France. Maybe that's why it's being staged.

'Actually, the process was more chicken and egg,' says Lester. 'When Nick decided to do Henry V, the war with Iraq was a distant possibility. Then events gathered pace, and it became clear the production had to be in modern dress; that it had to comment on our contemporary experience of its subject.

'But what the production doesn't do,' he continues, 'is make some simplistic, leftist, actorly stance against the war. The play is absolutely concerned with ideas of power and legitimacy, which - thanks to the struggle for Iraq - are things modern audiences are very attuned to. But we've also concentrated on the very real experience of battle; what it might be like to be out there facing death. We've had an SAS man in to teach us about guns, which was cool.'

Having made history as the first black actor to appear in a Sondheim musical in Sam Mendes's production of Company in 1995 (a later appearance in Sweeney Todd won him an Olivier award), he's been pushing the boundaries of theatre ever since. In 1997, he played Rosalind in Declan Donnellan's all-male production of As You Like It, and in 2001 he made a radical Hamlet in Peter Brook's reworked version of the play. Now, here he is, a black actor playing a very English king.

For Lester, the thrill of theatre is reconstructing one's experience of any given text. 'Scripts should carry the subtitle To Be Explored,' he says. 'Words are simply words: they can, and should, take people somewhere different each time they are spoken.'

Perhaps thanks to this, his reputation is firmly established in theatre: 'I'm able to pick and choose my roles,' he says matter-of-factly. But it's not the case with TV and film, the exception being the 1998 film Primary Colors. When he left for Hollywood, it was thought British theatre had lost him forever. Instead, the right parts simply didn't happen.

'I dunno: you tell me why no one wants to put me on screen,' he says. 'I can't be objective.' Lester chooses his parts with forensic precision. 'There's no point doing a job unless you can constantly take it to new heights,' he says. 'Otherwise, what do you learn?'