Davies goes dark

He has been described as 'the first international sex symbol from Chingford,' 'one of the nation's most popular performers,' and 'that man from the Abbey National adverts'.

Yet no matter how hard critics agonise over the secrets of Alan Davies's rise and rise, their frazzled brains repeatedly yield up the same two words - 'hair' (he's recently had those distinctive Byronic locks chopped off) and 'likeability'.

Hardly adequate to summarise the range of a man who kicked off his professional career as a stand-up comedian, bewitched 12 million viewers as the magician detective in Jonathan Creek, starred in the critically acclaimed Bob And Rose, and --of course - became a household name in those Abbey National advertisements.

Even so, should Davies ever give us his Dane, it's likely that newspapers will have a field day with headlines such as 'Putting the hair into Hamlet', or - inevitably - 'Beyond the fringe'.

Although it's hard to imagine Davies performing one of Shakespeare's most challenging roles, he is not so quick to rebuff the suggestion. Asked about his prospects as a Hamlet or a Vanya he says, simply, 'I'd like to do more theatre'. For although he became famous as a comedian, he spent several years training as an actor, both at his school and at the University Of Kent At Canterbury, and trod the boards in a student production of Steven Berkoff's Decadence.

Now he's poised to make his West End debut in Morris Panych's black comedy, Auntie And Me. 'I was so established as a comedian by the mid-Nineties that I was really hard to cast, even though I'd been interested in doing theatre again for a while,' he admits.

Defiant that he was not going to be caught up in 'some money-spinning revival', his interest was stirred when the producer David Johnson rang him last April and announced 'I think I've found a play for you, darling'. On the surface it doesn't sound like much - a man goes to visit his estranged aunt, who has summoned him because she is dying.

Yet Auntie And Me includes two entertaining murder attempts - a marked departure for Mr Likeable - and is structured and written with such a sharp ear for the absurdities, as well as the tragedies, of death that at last year's Edinburgh Festival its acid-sharp script proved the perfect vehicle for reintroducing Davies as a thesp.

'Morris Panych [the Canadian playwright] came over to England to discuss the script with us, and said that it was based on a true story. He was in hospital visiting a friend, and he could overhear a nurse talking to an elderly patient in the cubicle next door, explaining that "so-and-so can't make itî, and "so-andso sends their loveî, and "oh dear you're crying, would you like a tissue?î. From that image of someone being lonely and dying, he created a picture of an old woman trapped in a room, waiting for her nephew to visit her. The irony is that when he arrives, it emerges that neither of them are particularly nice people,' Davies chuckles. 'Which is something that really attracted me to the script.'

Certainly Davies's character Kemp deals out some brutal one-liners to the seemingly vulnerable old lady who has summoned him to her bedside. At first he explains to her that he couldn't read the handwriting in her letter, complaining that 'old and dying looks very much like yodelling'. Later he snaps, 'Let's not talk about anything depressing. Do you want to be cremated?'