Bernard Shaw isn't stuffy and has much to say about mordern marriage, as

Charles Hutchinson discovers.

SERENA Evans must have made a deep impression on director Christopher Luscombe. So much so, he has ended up casting her in the title role in George Bernard Shaw's Candida, six years after they worked together for the one and only time.

"We were in the cast together for Alan Ayckbourn's A Small Family Business in Chichester, and since then he has started directing shows, and this year he offered me this role," says Serena, who can be seen at York Theatre Royal in the closing week of Oxford Stage Company's tour next week.

"Candida was a part I really wanted to do: I was working with the actress Belinda Lang who said to me 'You should read this play; I think you would be suited to playing Candida'. So I read it, and I'm not saying that I thought I would make a splendid potential wife for a parson but... well, it's hard to say 'Yes, I think I should be playing this marvellous woman'!"

Nevertheless, Christopher was convinced he had found the ideal actress to play Candida, the wife of the Reverend James Morrell, whose perfect family life is turned upside down when a young poet falls passionately in love with Candida.

"I really do think Serena is a wonderful actress, and I love it when casting comes to you like a flash of lightning, as it did for this role," he says. "Serena has a comic spirit about her and that's a very good way to do this play: if you had an actress without a sense of humour, Candida would be a pain."

On the surface, Shaw's play - written in 1894 and first performed in public 100 years ago - is a light comedy about romance but, underneath, the Irish playwright has much to say about the ways in which men and women love each other. That demands skilfully judged performances from Luscombe's cast, in particular his Candida.

"Serena is a very intelligent actress and also emotionally intelligent. There's a danger of Candida being played as a nice, gentle hostess, but Candida is not necessarily a nice person and so we've had a lot of fun debating that grey area for Serena's performance. It's not black and white, and the audience will enjoy the moral choices in the play being fuzzy."

Serena says the trick to playing the "marvellous" Candida is to do so as if she were ordinary. "She is very intelligent, given that this is 1894; intelligent but probably slightly bored and so she is interested in other ideas and things around the world. I suppose it would now be called thinking outside the box," she says.

"Today she would have fallen straight off the rails. But in 1894 she doesn't, though she is pretty racy for her time. I guess the modern equivalent would be someone who was trying everything to lead a good life but felt trapped and then had to make a choice.

"In Candida, the husband says Candida should stay with him only if she loves him and not for legal reasons, so she does face a choice... in 1894, before the Suffragettes, so of course she stays. If she had done anything else, the play wouldn't have been put on.

"However, the point is that she chooses to stay with her husband for all the right reasons, and that in itself is very liberating."

Candida is not performed regularly and yet it still carries a resonant sting. "It's that same old thing today: marriage and choices you make," says Serena. "People still feel they are very stuck and yet they have a choice to stay or go, and so it's an incredibly relevant play. No one is ever trapped physically - they are only trapped by their own beliefs - but you can feel people tensing up as they watch this play."

They may tense up but Christopher believes they will nevertheless enjoy the comic relief of this once-controversial drawing-up comedy. "Why do people think Shaw's plays all last four hours?" he says. "He's witty and he's sexy: people say he doesn't understand sex but I think he was just screwed up by it. His writing is very exotic."

Candida, Oxford Stage Company, York Theatre Royal, July 27 to July 31, 7.30pm plus 2.30pm Saturday matinee. Box office: 01904 623568.

Updated: 16:20 Thursday, July 22, 2004