STEPHEN Beckett played PC Jarvis for five years in The Bill and set hearts fluttering in his two years as love rat Dr Ramsden in Coronation Street. However, neither role qualifies as the career highlight of this RADA-trained actor.

Instead, he names his summer season on the East Coast, performing in two Alan Ayckbourn premieres, Drowning On Dry Land and Private Fears In Public Places, and the 20th anniversary revival of A Chorus Of Disapproval at the Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough.

"Working with Alan is phenomenal," says Stephen. "It's very hard to talk about Alan without ending up like a brown nose, but for me it has been the absolute highlight of my career so far. He is such a great director and a wonderful writer, and yet to me he is 'Alan'... and then every so often I'll stop and think about who I'm working with and I'll have a star-struck moment where I think he is one of those blokes who comes around every 400 years."

Private Fears In Public Places, the last piece in the Stephen Joseph summer jigsaw, opens on Thursday, with its darkly comic study of six people living six separate lives yet all becoming strangely linked by circumstance.

Stephen plays Dan, a British Army officer who has been thrown out of the Army and is in a dysfunctional relationship with his girlfriend, a partnership that has been going on too long.

"Dan has been discharged without honour, in disgrace essentially, though the reason is never said - but I have decided in my mind what it is," he says.

"I had a chat with Alan about it: I went for something a bit more serious and he said 'Maybe you should pull back from that' and we came up with a story that was right for me and right for him. So that's the back story."

This is the side of acting that goes unseen: the preparation to build the character. "I've been trying to analyse where Alan's magic lies as a director and I think it's the environment he creates. He takes all the pressure out of the rehearsal room so it's a safe place to be and it's focused too. You feel safe but free to express yourself, and you spend most of the time laughing and telling anecdotes, and yet somehow the play comes together," says Stephen.

"The anecdotes can lead you to something Alan wants you to do in the play. He can be telling you something in a coffee break, directing it towards you, and you'll suddenly realise he's giving you a pearl about the scene you've just been rehearsing.

"He has this ability to drop in exactly the right image to unwrap the way to do a scene: he tunes into the mind of an actor like no other director I have worked with."

Ayckbourn says the theme of his play is "the knock-on effect which our own unilateral, individual actions can often have upon another - sometimes a complete stranger".

"We may not even be aware of this," the playwright adds. "Nonetheless, we are all of us linked; we are related. And whether we like it or not, none of us can truly stand alone or indeed remain aloof or immune."

Dan's behaviour in Private Fears is a case in point.

"He's going through that thing of getting out of one relationship and into another, and he's drinking heavily because he's trying to numb himself from his realities. He comes from three or four generations of top army material and he can't match up to it, so he drinks - and he drinks Scotch and water, which tends to be a morose drink," Stephen says.

"He's either drunk or hung over in most scenes and, like all the characters, he's lonely. There is the tone of Robert Altman's film Short Cuts about it in that they all end up in very different places to where they started, and yet after their catharsis they're not necessarily in the happiest of places. Dan ends up in the same place geographically but a very different place emotionally."

In a piece of perfect theatrical symmetry, the six cast members who opened the season in Drowning On Dry Land in Aril now conclude it in Private Fears. "I've been in Scarborough since March 28 and it's a rarity to have that repertory feeling: I last did a year in rep at the National Theatre in 1992.

"There's something like 28 actors in the building this summer, with the children's shows and lunchtime shows, and the companies for Love's A Luxury and Alan's plays, and there'll only be the six of us left to do Private Fears," says Stephen.

Ayckbourn says that 80 per cent of a production comes down to the casting.

"With the way he writes, he knows the internal psychology of his characters and he has this gift of being able to see into people's souls, so he can get the right actor for the right part," says Stephen.

He is not blowing his own trumpet, but he must be flattered that Ayckbourn has now cast him in four of his productions, starting with Way Upstream last autumn. What's more, his Ayckbourn year will continue: Drowning On Dry Land is to go on tour.

Private Fears In Public Places, Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough, August 12 to September 4. Box office: 01723 370541.

Updated: 16:32 Thursday, August 05, 2004