Domestic wordplay

While researching TS Eliot, the actor Will Keen discovered that the poet sometimes took the idea of himself as a tortured artist rather too literally. "He used to wear green make-up in order to make himself look pale, wan and lost," he says. "He really liked the idea of being this suffering customer who had a nightmare of a wife."

TS Eliot may be a staple on every English literature syllabus for penning some of the greatest poems of the 20th century but he was also famously married to Vivienne Haigh-Wood, a woman afflicted by periodic fits of madness whom Eliot married in 1915 and who was eventually incarcerated in a mental asylum.

She was so unstable that she once attacked Virginia Woolf with a toy knife; poured chocolate into a letter box, ruining several important manuscripts; and once nearly killed herself and her husband by grabbing hold of the steering wheel and driving the car into a ditch.

Madness always enhances a biopic, particularly when the subject is an experimental poet, which partly explains why Michael Hastings' 1984 play about the couple, Tom And Viv, made it to the big screen with Willem Dafoe and Miranda Richardson in 1994. Now it is being revived in its original form at the Almeida, with Keen playing Eliot.

The story is a controversial one not just because it shows how Eliot deserted Vivienne near the end of their marriage, which precipitated her breakdown and led to her being sectioned, but because it repeats the assertion that she supplied him with some of his most famous lines. (When the film was being made, Eliot's loyal second wife Valerie refused to co-operate, denying the filmmakers access to Eliot's poetry.) And Keen admits that he initially found it hard to sympathise with Eliot.

"There's a coldness about him that I found difficult to forgive, partly because his ambition seems so clinical," he says. "I always found his poetry tricky for the same reason: it's so brittle and intellectual, bright and brilliant, but it does make you wonder what's inside. But that's the interesting thing about him, the extent to which he tries to create this glazed, emotionless surface, yet there's so much going on underneath. He was very dressy, which I always think is very revealing. He hid himself behind various different personae but he was also addicted to pain, both his and that of others."

You may not have heard of Will Keen but he is quietly becoming one of our most compelling stage actors, thanks to an unerring ability to access the further psychological reaches of the roles he plays. He most recently played the murderous De Flores as a slick, utterly watchable psychopath rather than as the stock ugly thug in Declan Donnellan's penetrating production of The Changeling.

Nor is Tom And Viv the first time that Keen has had to confront a role that treads a fine line between fact and fiction: last year he starred in The Rubenstein Kiss which was based on the American couple The Rosenbergs, executed in the 1950s for treason at the height of McCarthyism. He is aware of the difficulties thrown up by this sort of approach. "My argument is that if you were to change the name of the famous character in the play, would you still want to see it?" he says. "In this case it's an emphatic yes. It's the story of an incredible marriage and in that respect it's a completely truthful play."

Tom And Viv is previewing now, opens Sep 22 until Nov 4, Almeida Theatre, Almeida Street N1, Mon to Sat 7.30pm (Sep 22, 7pm), Sat mats 3pm, £6 to £29.50. Tel: 020 7359 4404. www.almeida.co.uk Tube: Highbury and Islington