Page keeps theatre turning

Donald Sutherland, who makes his first stage appearance in 20 years in Enigmatic Variations - and his first in London for a majestic 36 years - could not be placing his nerves in a more suitable pair of hands than those of Anthony Page. The 65-year-old director has a reputation for handling high-voltage stars that is, according to one insider, "nothing short of legendary".

It's almost impossible to associate this immensely genial, highly sensitive man with the inflammatory egos he has had to soothe in a theatre and film career that spans more than 40 years. Page is a mild version of Sean Connery, with bushy eyebrows and a silvery, commanding presence - a thoroughly likeable and unlikely product of a military colonial family in India. Handling theatrical explosives is probably the last thing you would mark him down for.

Yet at the Royal Court, where he started out as assistant director to Lindsay Anderson in the late 1950s, Page rapidly became John Osborne's director of choice in charge of a string of plays for this notoriously daunting author. He has worked memorably with that most difficult of temperaments, Nicol Williamson, in Inadmissible Evidence. He has negotiated the hazards of Vanessa Redgrave as Renee Richards in the controversial transsexual biopic, Second Serve. And he has even gone into the ring with Richard Burton in the film Absolution.

Underneath that softly spoken charm there is said to be a tough steely centre. "Anthony is a highly intelligent diplomat, but he's a really formidable opponent when fighting for what he believes to be right - - or his rights," said one of his admirers in the theatre world. "Reports that he is an egotist are totally incorrect."

"Directors ought to know about acting," contends Page. "The technique of how to keep a play alive, how you make actors reach for their freshest, most spontaneous powers every night, are not things that go out of fashion." He ascribes his own skills to "the brilliant grounding I had studying method and Stanislavsky under Sandy Meisner. That sort of acting from yourself, knowing how to harness real energy rather than tricks and intellect. I think that's probably what my strong suite is with actors. People don't realise how difficult that is. It's not that I have wildly original views of plays.

It's just that I've been blessed with actors who go for broke and know how to, somehow. I am sure in any great theatre company that's what happens."

"The trust actors place in you becomes a sort of Zen thing when you've done it for decades - which I'm afraid it is now." It wasn't always thus. "When I left the Court in 1973 I really couldn't have cared if I never sat in a theatre again," says Page. "I was so OD'd on it. In fact I used to take a torch in case I got bored so I could read a book. At that point I thought a lot of acting in America was much more exciting than in England. I'd just seen the films of Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and Jason Robards in Long Day's Journey into Night. There was a power and rawness about American acting that just didn't seem to be happening here. I needed to lose my faith in theatre in order to find it."

It was the departure of the director Karel Reisz under several clouds during rehearsals for Edward Albee's Three Tall Women that brought Page back to the West End after nearly two decades in Hollywood. Page duly conjured an Olivier-award winning performance from Dame Maggie Smith that brought about one of the most remarkable and unusual renaissances in modern theatre history, namely his own. "I did not find Maggie difficult, actually," asserts Page. "She's such a brilliant actress, you're more concerned about where she can go, rather than the difficulty of getting there. The same with Donald Sutherland. It's very nerve-racking when you haven't been on stage for a long time."

"But Donald is so like the great male actors of the 1960s - Nicol Williamson, Richard Harris, Robert Stevens, Peter O'Toole ... They were much less polite, much more emotional, and far more powerful.

That slightly dangerous, unpredictable aura about them when they come on stage is so rare now it's almost priceless."