Electricity, West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds, until April 24

THIS has been one swell week for Christopher Eccleston.

First comes the announcement that the 40-year-old Salford actor is to play Doctor Who when the cult science fiction series returns to BBC1 next year.

Then he learns he has been nominated for a BAFTA television award for Best Actor for his role as the Messiah who returns to Earth in the form of a Manchester City fan in The Second Coming, and tonight he opens at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in the world premiere of Murray Gold's electricity.

Filming for Dr Who will begin in Cardiff later this year, with Eccleston being cast to play - in the words of Jane Tranter, BBC Controller of Drama Commissioning - an "overtly modern hero".

Executive producer and writer Russell T Davies looks forward to renewing a working partnership with Eccleston forged in ITV1's The Second Coming.

"We considered many great actors for this wonderful part, but Christopher was our first choice. This man can give the Doctor a wisdom, wit and emotional range as far reaching as the Doctor's travels in time and space. His casting raises the bar for all of us. It's going to be a magnificent, epic, entertaining journey, and I can't wait to start!"

Eccleston himself is no less enthusiastic. In his only official statement since news of his casting broke, he says: "I am absolutely delighted to be playing Doctor Who. I'm looking forward to joining forces again with the incredible writer, Russell T Davies, taking both loyal viewers and a new generation on a journey through time and space. Which way is the TARDIS? I can't wait to get started!"

First, however, his attention is focused on his return to the West Yorkshire Playhouse, the Leeds theatre where he made his Shakespearean stage debut as Hamlet in artistic director Ian Brown's modernist production of Hamlet in Autumn 2002.

Eccleston will be playing Jakey, a builder from Essex, who is taking his time with Welshman Leo (Patrick Brennan) and Jakey's son, Bizzy (Oliver Wood), to complete a flat renovation that should have been finished months ago.

"We're in this flat of this middle-class Hampstead woman, building her a quiet space, a room for tranquillity. We said we'd do it in six weeks, but 16 weeks later we're still there," says Eccleston. "It's a play about tensions between the classes and genders, and about the electricity that runs between people, and it is very, very funny, and truthful.

"It reminds me a great deal of Fawlty Towers in some ways, as that was a great English satire about the English, and this play is very clever and at times very broad."

Where Hamlet is so well known - and the dual attraction of Eccleston and Shakespeare's tragedy resulted in a sell-out run - Electricity is more of a gamble. It is a new work by Gold, a writer better known for composing television music for dramas such as Shameless, The Second Coming, Clocking Off and Queer As Folk.

Yet Eccleston gives equal weight to playing the haunted young Danish prince and the "good looking but past-his-best" Essex builder. "I think it's a blank canvas when you do a classic or a new play," he says.

Yet surely the audience expectations are much greater when seeing Hamlet?

"I don't think about audience expectations," he says, turning the question to ice. "I think about the work in hand, just concentrating on learning the lines and not bumping into the furniture. I can't dwell on audience expectations, except for hoping they have a good evening."

Be it The Second Coming or Dr Who - which will have scripts by Russell T Davies and The League of Gentleman's Mark Gatiss, among others - or now Electricity, Eccleston is drawn by the quality of writing.

"The Electricity script is very well written. Good writing has always been the guiding light of my career," he says. "Without a decent script an actor is nothing."

Yet a 'decent script' is only part of an actor's canvas. Even at 40, Eccleston considers himself to be a foal on stage, having concentrated on television and film roles in the likes of Cracker, Our Friends In the North, Shallow Grave, Jude and 28 Days Later.

"I'm still playing a catch-up. I know where I am with TV and film but theatre is a new experience," he says.

Such candour can catch you by surprise. "Hamlet was an interesting experience, though I was not overly impressed with what I did..."

Really? "I know it was a good production but in terms of my own expectations I fell short, and I will go back to it. I'd like to do it once more for my own pride," he says. When? "Very soon. I'm no spring chicken.

"I was asking a lot of myself to do that role with the limited theatre experience I had his previous stage role had been in Miss Julie in the West End in 1999, and all the publicity I had to do."

You can sense the weight of unfinished business.

"I don't think any actor doing Hamlet will ever be satisfied but there was more I could have achieved. Gielgud was obsessed with it and went back to it five times, and I would liked to have enjoyed it more myself. I felt burdened with a lot, though the audience enjoyed it," he says.

Incidentally, this is much the way the equally perfectionist Berwick Kaler is wont to reflect on his York Theatre Royal pantomimes.

"When you do Hamlet in London you get six months to do it. We had a four-week run, and I could have done with two months more, because once you're on stage, you want to maximise it and I felt I did improve as I went along. I was 50 per cent better by the final night."

Such exacting standards mark out Eccleston, who mocks the journalistic laziness that labels him as intense. "You want people to take a little bit of care when they write about you. Fifty, seventy-five per cent of the time, my surname gets spelt wrong, and you think 'that's the easiest thing to get right'."

Likewise, he does not hold truck with being pigeonholed as a specialist in confrontational roles.

"Jakey is a great challenge in a lighter-toned way than some roles I've done, though people don't think of me in these roles for some reason, even though I've done parts like Nicky in Our Friends In the North."

Could it be those granite features and deep-sunk eyes? "That is bone structure and there's nothing I can do about that," he says. "Adolf Hitler had a very non-confrontational face, but never judge a book by its cover."

Electricity, West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds, until April 24. Box office: 0113 213 7700.

Updated: 16:29 Thursday, March 25, 2004