Rising to the challenge

Peter Capaldi is covered in sweat from having spent the morning bounding around a room pretending, among other things, to be a window frame, a cupboard and a door. 'It's rather exhausting,' he admits. 'Not that I'm not fit, although I'm not particularly. It's just a real challenge. But then that's what I wanted. To be challenged.'

You certainly don't get much more of a challenge than a new Michael Frayn two-hander in which you have to play the props as well as your character. Yet Capaldi is also relishing the break from his most recent incarnation: the expletive-spitting Malcolm Tucker from Armando Iannucci's frenetic political satire The Thick Of It. A recently aired hour-long special, Spinners And Losers, was written, shot and broadcast within just three weeks, Capaldi says. 'To be honest, I actually wanted a bit of a rest,' admits the actor, who in person looks endearingly gangly, crumpled, red-eyed and frayed. 'It's exhausting, swearing all the time. Particularly since Tucker was a real performance for me. I'm not like that at all.'

It's a strange idea of a rest: a triple bill of British absurdist plays, one of which is the aforementioned Frayn premiere The Crimson Hotel; the other two are short 1957 pieces by the neglected English writer NF Simpson.

Directed by Douglas Hodge, the first, A Resounding Tinkle, involves a suburban couple who argue about what to call their pet elephant before the RSPCA arrives. The second, Gladly Otherwise, features a housewife entertaining a stranger while her husband sits mute in the corner. The Crimson Hotel, meanwhile, is a farce set in the desert.

'They are rather strange,' Capaldi admits. 'But I'm keen that people understand that they [the plays] are extremely funny. People assume the Theatre of the Absurd means some piece of grave academia; a dusty piece of National Theatre Bookshop boredom. But certainly Wally [the name Simpson goes by, in reference to divorcee Wallis Simpson, who married King Edward VIII] doesn't think of his work in that way. He had a hugely formative impact on Peter Cook's EL Wisty monologues, while the Monty Python team have always cited Simpson as an influence. And the plays have this post-war, nihilistic surrealism that recalls the Goons and Spike Milligan and which I think was the zeitgeist at the time.'

Capaldi is himself a big Python fan. More than anything, however, he is relishing the opportunity to really stretch his theatrical muscles after years spent in employment that was always gainful but rarely spectacular.

Born in Glasgow and now 48, Capaldi has always been the sort of actor whose face you recognise instead of his name (his credits include Bill Forsyth's 1983 film Local Hero, The Crow Road, last year's BBC comedy Aftersun and the film Dangerous Liaisons) but BBC4's The Thick Of It sent his profile soaring virtually overnight.

'I'd resigned myself to knocking about playing Bill in Casualty which, by the way, I'm more than happy to do,' he says. 'But to suddenly be in this very edgy show, to be learning again, was incredible. Not that I stopped learning but I'd reached this point where you are just employed to do what you do and not go any further.'

But he is not letting his new-found kudos go to his head. Firstly, because he acknowledges that The Thick Of It was more a critical hit than a mass market one ('I mean, really, it was on a tiny channel').

But also Capaldi knows almost better than anyone that recognition can be as fleeting as the wind. In 1995, he won an Oscar for the short film he directed called Franz Kafka's It's A Wonderful Life, which briefly threatened to unlock the doors to a Hollywood career as a director. Instead, he fretted for a while about just what it was he wanted to do, made a film, Strictly Sinatra, that flopped and then settled into relative anonymity.

'There was this brilliant moment at the Oscars that prefigured everything,' he says. 'I'd just received the statue, and was utterly overcome, and was immediately ushered into another room to meet the world's press. And there was no journalist there remotely interested in asking me a single question. Not even anyone from the Dundee Courier.'

So Capaldi is sanguine about his career, although he is still passionate about making films. Currently, he's working on a project with Ewan McGregor which, he admits, has been in the pipeline for seven years but which has been sidelined partly because of his recent TV commitments.