Jack hopes play will serve its purpose

People will be familiar with The Servant from the 1963 film starring Dirk Bogarde and James Fox. The screenplay was by Harold Pinter - but Neil Bartlett's adaptation is based on Robin Maugham's original novella and stage play of 1958.

I play the rich, idle Tony and Michael Feast plays Barrett, the servant employed to keep house in Chelsea on Tony's return from abroad. The play is about class, that horrible thing which still hangs over this country whether we like it or not. The Servant is also about the particular kind of sickness that can arise from being idle and rich. It is about the way that the upper-middle classes can be hoisted on their own petard.

Tony is such a great part. Talk about the seventh level of the inferno. The last couple of days I've been travelling home from rehearsals thinking, why do I feel so terrible? Then going, oh yeah, of course, it's my slide from the heights of inherited wealth, through alcoholism to sexual depravity and general darkness. And Mickey Feast is perfect as Barrett - if he wants to, he can switch from being very charming and seemingly quite ineffectual to being bloody terrifying. I think it is one of the great double acts in literature.

Hopefully, it won't be a comfortable show to watch. It's not like you leave on a big, buzzy, top note. It's bleak, but it will look good. It's a Neil Bartlett show, for God's sake. The Servant marks Neil's return to the Lyric Hammersmith as artistic director and the building is buzzing. Why is he revered? He's such a stylish bastard, basically.