York Mystery Plays 2012, Museum Gardens, York, until August 27

THE wait is over. The York Mystery Plays 2012 opened last night on their return to the Museum Gardens for the first time since 1988.

That year, Hindi actor Victor Banerjee played Christ in Steven Pimlott’s open-air production, a piece of casting that attracted national attention.

This time, the talking point surrounding the traditionally professional role of Christ is not so much the choice of Ferdinand Kingsley, 24-year-old son of Scarborough knight Sir Ben Kingsley, but Christ and God being played by one actor in Mike Kenny’s new adaptation.

“I had a vague notion that the York Mystery Plays were happening this summer, and I first knew about the chance to play God and Jesus when my agent brought it to my attention in March,” says Ferdinand, who was immediately struck by the prospect of working with about 500 community actors in York.

“I went and met Damian and Paul [co-directors Damian Cruden and Paul Burbridge, artistic director of York Theatre Royal and Riding Lights respectively], who sold it to me straightaway and I came away from the meeting, thinking ‘what a novel thing to do’.”

The National Theatre and Royal Shakespeare Company actor instinctively sensed he needed to play the dual role. “One reason for doing it is that every part should be a bit scary,” he says.

No role, not even Hamlet, is surely bigger than playing God and Jesus rolled into one. “It’s an event as much as a part,” says Ferdinand, contemplating the epic scale of this summer’s production. “There are thousands of people who are involved in the telling of this story, and a lot of that mission is to make everyone feel they’re part of the story and that their part is just as valid; every thread in the silk is just as important.”

He is not understating his role, merely being a team player, when he says: “As much as the part I’m playing is incredible, it’s the whole event that matters, and at this stage of my life and my career, I thought, ‘Why don’t I test myself?’ in such circumstances. It was the right thing to do.”

Ferdinand’s previous stage job was in Hamlet at the National Theatre when he understudied Rory Kinnear in the title role as well as playing Rosencrantz. “If I ever had any tips for a young actor I would say, ‘Learn Hamlet’, because you feel your brain being stretched,” he says.

His mind, body and voice are now being stretched by doubling up as God and Jesus in Kenny’s interpretation of the medieval Mystery Plays that constructs the story as God’s journey through the Old and New Testaments.

“The more you think about it, the less extreme it seems, uniting the Holy Trinity as one,” says Ferdinand. “In Mike Kenny’s adaptation, God the creator, with the responsibility for creation, can’t deal with man as well as he had hoped, so he has to send down to Earth his being in human form to understand man and experience temptation and love and loss – all very human emotions – and take that back up with him having changed things on Earth.”

Ferdinand is significantly younger than past actors who have played God (and indeed Christ, following in the footsteps of Banerjee, Christopher Timothy and the late Simon Ward).

“The young father is the concept I’m holding on to. He is someone who creates life like a parent does; in this case, he creates a world for them to live in and then has enormous responsibility for that world, setting up a world with rules and then he has to abide by them,” he says.

“When they don’t behave, he has to bring the flood, and it’s the same in the Last Judgement, where the idea of good and evil is not just about the relationship with God but the relationship with life.”

Ferdinand acknowledges that playing both God and Jesus amounts to “more work”, but it pays dividends, he stresses. “Each part informs the other,” he says. “I’d rather do it this way than come on as the adult Jesus and die. I’d rather be in the space all the time.”

Hence comparisons are made with the vexed Hamlet. “There are moments where there’s an amazing parallel with Hamlet and all great stories: the battle with fate or acceptance of fate and whether he has any choice in his journey,” says Ferdinand.

From fate, the discussion moves on to faith. “For me, I believe in something bigger than us, though I couldn’t say actually what, In terms of the play, it differs individually, but it works on a cosmic and purely human level as an exploration of the human condition and the human spirit,” he says.

“The message is that when you’re being good to one person, you’re being good for everyone – and if you’re bad, that affects everyone.

“Whether it’s a religious act or human, it’s just as significant, and if you’re being good to a human you’re being good to God.

“But above all, it’s really important that the production is inclusive rather than exclusive.”

Ferdinand is delighted to be performing on a Yorkshire stage. Not only is his father, Sir Ben, a son of the East Coast, but his mother, actress Alison Sutcliffe, took her early professional steps at Harrogate Theatre.

“I know York well through family, and I have family in Haworth, Bingley, Saltaire, Leeds, and though I was raised in Stratford-upon-Avon and live in London and I’ve never lived up here, so it’s not a homecoming, nevertheless the scales are tipped towards Yorkshire because my family is northern, and I’ve always come up to Yorkshire” he says.

He has found his place in God’s own country, as we like to call it. “These are Yorkshire plays that come out of people who live and breathe York, so they don’t sound 800 years old, but fresh and vibrant,” he says.

• GRAEME Hawley had never played a baddie until he landed the role of John Stape, one of Coronation Street’s most infamous villains with a storyline up to his neck in kidnap, manslaughter, murder and deception.

Now, like proverbial buses, along comes the second such part with almost indecent haste. The 37-year-old former soap star with the Coventry roots and Manchester postal address has leapt over the Pennines to be the Devil in the York Mystery Plays 2012.

“Before Coronation Street, I never got parts as the bad guy; I was always Mr Goody Two Shoes or Mr Over-Excitement,” says Graeme.

“But I always thought it would be interesting to take on a role as someone who comes across as having a cheeky grin and wouldn’t do anyone any harm but in fact is up to mischief, and that’s what I played in Coronation Street.

“After Richard Hillman, who was the archetypal villain, they wanted someone different, and John Stape was certainly that: the completely innocent-looking, butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-my-mouth guy, who finds himself spiralling into a descent that leads to evil.”

The devil has all the best tunes, or so they say, and who is Graeme to disagree? “That’s a path I don’t mind having gone down, and I’m happy to keep going down it if there is a villain’s route,” he says.

“Although that deceptive front is more difficult to play off with the Devil, and it might be a bridge too far, in our play we don’t set Lucifer up at the start as evil but as the bearer of light and then the descent follows because being the bearer of light is the thing that corrupts him.

“It’s a gradual process and then you have a really interesting journey where because you place him against the journey of God and Jesus, the journeys cross over, one going up and the other going inexorably down.”

Graeme acknowledges that his “Corrie killer” past could help to boost ticket sales, out of audience curiosity to discover what devilish deed John Stape did next.

“That is something I relish as an actor rather than something that disappoints me. If they come to see me because of the expectation of seeing what the guy who played John Stape is doing now, hopefully they’ll be surprised by how different he is in the role of the Devil, thinking, ‘Wow, I didn’t know he had that range in him,” he says.

“I’ll never get a better chance to show that range, first in a television role and then on the biggest stage in Britain this summer.”

Graeme is performing on a York stage for the first time but he knows the city well from his wife, actress Elianne Byrne, working for the Theatre Royal several times, most memorably as Mrs Perks in The Railway Children.

“I’ve come over to see her perform and we’re both very fond of the city and spent time here, and I’ve been very keen to work here as I know Damian [Cruden] well and have been wanting to work with him.”

In fact, landing the role of the Devil is a case of third time lucky. “I had my first audition here 11 years ago for The Three Musketeers and I did an audition for Pilot Theatre in about 1998 when I was straight out of drama school at Manchester Met,” he says.

Graeme spoke to Damian at a memorial service earlier this year, asking him what he was working on at present. “‘Oh, I’m doing the Mystery Plays’, he said, and we had a conversation about it, but not specifically about me being in it. But four weeks later, I got a call from my agent, saying that Damian wanted to see me for the Devil.”

And so Graeme is appearing on an outdoor stage for the first time since the summer of 1998, when, fresh out of drama school, he appeared in Romeo And Juliet at the Eye Castle ruins in Suffolk. “I played Mercutio,” he recalls. “He likes to cause a bit of trouble, doesn’t he, just like the Devil!”

• The York Mystery Plays 2012 run until August 27, performed on a 1,400-capacity thrust stage in front of the St Mary’s Abbey ruins, in Museum Gardens, York. Box office: 01904 623568 or yorktheatreroyal.co.uk