Dedicated flower of passion

Michael Grandage, who has just won the Evening Standard award for best director, is fast developing an aura similar to the one that lights Sam Mendes in a golden glow.

It's one of those "if he weren't so bloody modest you'd want to vomit" haloes. He has been a theatre director for only six years, having given up the ghost of his acting career at 30. In that time he has mounted a mere dozen shows, including the productions of Passion Play and As You Like It which caught the eye of the Standard's jury. You will search in vain for a flop. Plus he's dishy.

No wonder the whispers have it that once Mendes can no longer take the strain of programming the Donmar and subjugating Hollywood, he will hand over the reins to Grandage, who has already been fast-tracked into an associate directorship. For the moment, you'll hear all the right noises about Grandage's commitment to the Crucible in Sheffield, where he is responsible for programming. "It is more important to me than anything," he says. "I have a real need to make that place come alive again and I don't see that as a short-term job." It's a sign of his personal magnetism that he has lured Joseph Fiennes up to Sheffield to play Edward II in February. Doubtless more stars will follow the scent northwards in pursuit of an odds-on hit.

The severest test of Grandage's Midas touch will come with his Donmar production of Merrily We Roll Along. No one has had a hit yet with Stephen Sondheim's backwardstravelling musical about the fracturing of a show-business dream. The original Broadway production in 1981 ran for 16 performances. (In the audience for the first preview last Friday, there was a Sondheimologist who had seen 12 of them.) "I do believe in the 20 years since that happened we've got more sophisticated," Grandage theorises. "I think the backwardsin-time sequence in 1981 was new and difficult. They just didn't make it work for a number of reasons, some beyond their control and some within. The one element that wasn't a problem was the piece. I long to say [to Sondheim], 'Do you resent composing this piece, because it's so up front?'"

Sondheim spent the next 15 years tinkering with it, to no avail. Grandage has resurrected the original structure, which starts with a famous composer returning as a guest speaker to the graduation ceremony of his old school to deliver a cautionary speech about the compromises required by life.

They then proceed to show him the wrong turnings he took, acting out for him a journey back through his marriages and career from decorated disappointment to coltish idealism.

Grandage is still at the coltish idealism stage. Franklyn, the show's hero, has a Simon-and-Garfunkel-style parting of the ways with his songwriting partner after a string of hit musicals. Grandage remains in partnership, on both a personal and creative level, with the designer Christopher Oram. There is also a part of him who is the hick from out of town. "At those awards last week, for that day, I turned back into this boy from Cornwall where I grew up. My parents are from what Peter Nichols brilliantly calls 'trade'. They owned a sweet shop in Penzance. I remember thinking, I would love to think I am as sophisticated and brilliant at networking as all these people are. But actually there comes a point when you realise you don't fit easily into that world."

While he seems to stick to the classical repertoire on the Crucible's huge stage, at the Donmar he is more of a miniaturist student - Good was his first show there - of men taking wrong turnings. His own wrong turning was to give up a place at Bristol University to audition for drama school. "I was good but I wasn't very good and I am ambitious enough to want to be very good. I hit 30 and I realised I was still substantially on the dole and just thought, this is ridiculous. I took my name out of Spotlight within a month and never went back."

If he doesn't wholly regret his years as an actor, it's because of "the massive amount I've learned from the bad directors as well as the good ones: all those people in rep who just couldn't cut it at all. I remember observing and thinking, this just isn't what it should be about. The biggest benefit to me was knowing the language of the rehearsal room in advance."

He has rapidly fashioned for himself what looks like the perfectly formed career. He has bookings up until 2003, including a production of Camus's Caligula at the National, and Nichols's Privates on Parade for the Donmar next Christmas. He is a buildings-based director who has not succumbed to the glamour of admin - unlike Franklyn, who is sidetracked into being president of a record company.