Return of a handsome devil

The star dressing-room at Drury Lane has managed to mislay its baseball-capped star. Turns out he's having a quiet ciggie out in the street and slipping some spare change to Colin, who lives under the arches at the side of the theatre.

"Don't spend it on something that will do you good," jokes Ian McShane, who used to go to the dogs himself in more ways than one. He has a lot of sympathy for poor devils, particularly now that he's playing one.

Dry for 13 years after a hell-raising past shared with the likes of Richard Burton and John Hurt, McShane works his way through nothing more dangerous than crateloads of Red Bull and cranberry juice these days as he limbers up for his musical debut. The whisky on his shelf belongs to Sir Cameron Mackintosh, whose new £4.5 million musical comedy, The Witches Of Eastwick, based on the 1987 film of the John Updike novel, opens next week. McShane takes the lead as the Lucifer-like Daryl Van Horne, following the tough act of Jack Nicholson in the movie version. But if anyone can summon up the diabolical cheek to play one horny little devil, it's this saturnine, blue-jowled actor with the sexy creases of experience in his cheeks.

There's a lot, lot more to 57-year-old McShane than the light comedy of Lovejoy, the antique rogue show that ran to six vastly successful series on BBC1 in the Eighties and Nineties and made him a millionaire as co-producer.

This, after all, is Joe Orton's former drinking buddy, who starred in the original 1965 production of Loot and uttered the c-word and the f-word on stage the same year in a play at the Arts Theatre Club under the auspices of the RSC. In a remarkably eclectic career that has surfed both old and new wave, he has worked with everyone from Binkie Beaumont to Ray Winstone - alongside whom he costars in the forthcoming gangster film Sexy Beast. The producer is Jeremy Thomas, whose father Ralph Thomas directed McShane in his first movie, The Wild And The Willing, while he was still at Rada.

Although Sky TV wants to revive Love-joy for a two-hour special, McShane has signed to play Van Horne for the next 12 months after being approached for the role in January. "Lovely Lionel Bart had told Cameron that I could sing; I used to know Lionel in Los Angeles. Are you going to say no to a brand-new musical produced by Cameron Mackintosh in the West End? I don't think so," he growls, in his best timber-rattling baritone.

"I'm not a big theatre-goer; I go now and then to see serious plays and I prefer listening to musicals on CD. But you've really got to see this show, which is a really fun mixture of flying tricks, vaudeville and comedy." It's a theatrical homecoming for McShane, whose last appearance in the West End was 30 years ago in the Alexei Arbuzov play The Promise, with Ian McKellen and Judi Dench. "Ian McKellen wanted that career in the theatre; I didn't. I had a very busy social life then; I used to love dog-racing. I think there's still a theatrical snobbery around, and you do get pigeonholed as an actor. But I haven't got time for all that bullshit.

"Stage acting is like being a jazz musician," adds McShane, a bebop fan. "You riff for a couple of hours and then you go home. It varies every night, you get the tempo from the other people. And when you've got a 24-piece band like this show has, it's even better. When in trouble, look to the band, baby. You can put all the madness, all your crazy shit, into the work and then go home to vegetable soup and behave like a bourgeois."

With Orton and Burton among his tutors, the offstage craziness has long since been worked out of his system. "Cheeky was the word for Joe; he was dressed by Milletts, leatherette cap with a coat and bag. He and I became very friendly and we would go to the pub a lot. I was 23, Joe would have been 10 years older. Maybe part of the attraction was that I was so naively straight that Joe probably got a kick out of it. If you are going to be homophobic, don't be involved in the theatre," he adds, laughing. "The first guy I met at drama school was a gay black man, one of the sweetest guys in the world.

"When John Gielgud did an episode of Lovejoy, he kept calling me Loveboy by mistake. The two of us would sneak off set for a cigarette; he smoked Russian ones." At Rada, McShane shared a flat with John Hurt and learned drama and drinking in that order. "He's barking mad, silly old tart, I love John dearly, he makes me laugh. I sang The Party's Over at the end-of-term show and John said, 'You should be a singer.' I said, 'Is that a comment on my acting, John?'"