CHARLES HUTCHINSON traces the regal link between two theatre productions.

THE timing is coincidental.

Nevertheless, at the very same time that Christine Cox is playing The Queen in one Alan Bennett play at York Theatre Royal, over in Leeds Michael Pennington is playing King George III in another at the West Yorkshire Playhouse. Both productions open tonight. Spooky!

Christine will in fact be playing not one but two roles in Bennett's brace of plays on the Cambridge spy ring: The Queen, or HMQ as she is called, in A Question Of Attribution, and Australian actress Coral Browne in An Englishman Abroad.

Playing The Queen in Bennett's account of an imagined meeting between HMQ and the Keeper of The Queen's Collection, Sir Anthony Blunt, presents one immediate challenge. The play is set in 1968, but our image of The Queen is how she looks today.

"In 1968, she was in her late forties, she was a perfect size 12, and we forget that she was quite a lithe, athletic woman. We've lost that image; it's certainly not in my mind," says Christine. "We see how she was much lighter in movement than she is today."

Then add the small matter of The Queen being such a familiar figure. "Everybody has their idea of how The Queen is, but I will not try desperately to be The Queen; there's no way I could do that," says Christine, who comes from Doncaster stock.

"You have to at least try for the accent and you must get the clothes right but there's no way I'm going to look like The Queen. You just have to put that aside because she is what she is what she is, and you're representing her from Bennett's script.

"I've tried not to get hung up about it, because I'm not an impersonator, so for me, it's all just the fun of it."

Christine would prefer the focus to fall on content, not presentation. "The most interesting thing is the words that are being said - Bennett has said that - and we should remember that this encounter between The Queen and Blunt is a moment of imagination in Bennett's mind. Did The Queen know Blunt was guilty? How much was she told?

"This play is pure Bennett, all Bennett, just like the tale of Coral Browne and her meeting in Moscow with Guy Burgess. At the end of the day, the theme is not espionage but exile, the exiled self, and why people do that," she says. "The great thing Bennett succeeds in doing in these two plays is showing that none of us are what we appear to be on the surface."

The sentiment applies equally to King George III, the Farmer George of Bennett's The Madness Of George III. His condition was not madness but porphyria, although such a condition was not diagnosed until later medical advances.

There were those questioning Michael Pennington's own sanity when he agreed to take on a schedule that required him to commute by air between Edinburgh and Leeds for a week in August. By day he was rehearsing with director Rachel Kavanagh in Yorkshire; by night he was performing in Peter Stein's Edinburgh Festival production of The Seagull, all three and a half hours of it.

"I knew about the Bennett production in the early summer, pretty much the same time as The Seagull was confirmed," says Michael. "I wanted to do both, and to the credit of British Midland, I was able to travel to and fro, so thanks to them I'm able to stay in work into November!"

How did he prepare for his double stint in two complicated plays?

"The thing is to see it coming," Michael says. "I'm not going to say that my role in the Seagull was easy to play but I had many weeks of rehearsal and I was able to moonlight and learn the George III lines during The Seagull preparations. So I'd done a good amount of work before starting in Leeds."

Earlier this year, in late February, Michael appeared at York Theatre Royal in English Touring Theatre's production of John Gabriel Borkman, his first Ibsen performance. Now this celebrated Shakespearean actor is making his Bennett debut.

"My first Ibsen and my first Bennett in the same year! Ibsen I had avoided, but not Bennett. I will travel to do a good play by a writer I like. So, David Hare next, please.

"I'm always drawn to these writers like a magnet, particularly when I've been so associated with the classics. That's why I'm fighting a rearguard action now to do other writers." Even if that meant being in two places at once last month.

Single Spies, York Theatre Royal, tonight until October 11; box office 01904 623568. The Madness Of George III, West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds, tonight until October 18; box office 0113 213 7700.

Updated: 09:36 Friday, September 19, 2003