LUCY Chalkley shared a York stage for two months with one man, the same man, in three plays last autumn. This week, she returned to the Theatre Royal, the only woman in a company of nine men, including John Kirk, her co-star in The Studio's inaugural season of Happy Jack, Live Bed Show and Disco Pigs last September and October.

She is playing Curley's Wife, a lonely young woman with one eye on the muscular ranch workers and the other on Hollywood, in John Steinbeck's epic American drama Of Mice And Men.

"I knew a good half of the cast either from working with them or meeting them before," says Lucy, who had to come to terms with such male-dominated surroundings. "Testosterone is the word! There was a lot flying around in the first two weeks of rehearsal, I can tell you.

"Luckily, the dog we're using for the show, is a girl Penny, from Bolton, although she's playing a male - she's a good very actress!"

How did the men interact with Lucy in rehearsal at the Bolton Octagon? "They're very much blokey blokes not luvvies and I got the feeling they didn't quite know how to treat me: as one of the lads or a lady. They settled in the end for somewhere in the middle," she says.

"When it all really clicked in was in production week in Bolton, when I'd no longer be in jeans and a T-shirt, but in dresses and full make-up and I'd be in a separate dressing room on my own - but then Curley's Wife always feels separate so that's in keeping with the character."

In this story of mice, men and one woman, Lucy is separated by another factor too. "I'm around ten years younger than everyone else in the show. I'm the baby of the group," says Lucy, who is 25.

There have been other challenges for Lucy too. Having mastered a South Yorkshire grumble, Estuary English and Irish vernacular last autumn, the Herefordshire actress with the classical BBC voice has taken on a Californian accent, peppered with Hollywood enunciation, for Of Mice And Men.

"I love accents, so they never scare me. If a play requires an accent, half the time that's what interests me as part of the challenge is seeing if I'm going to get it right or wrong," says Lucy.

"With this play it's hard in that it's set in the 1930s before people really travelled around America. It would be easy to do it a deep South accent, but that's not the right accent, and general American isn't right either. It has to be Californian, and luckily we've had a really good dialect coach, Tim Charrington, to tweak the voice, getting the vowels to the right Californian length.

"I also talked to Tim a lot about finding the longing in Curley's Wife's voice. That defines her character: the loneliness, the longing, the planning, and the meanness too. It informs the way she acts, the way she uses her voice."

Lucy's performance concludes with what has been dubbed her death aria, in which she is shaken like a rag doll and has her neck 'broken'. Ironically, she had damaged her neck last summer when performing in The Three Musketeers at the Theatre Royal.

"That was my first concern, as I'd pulled a muscle in the Musketeers and I was still having physio. My doctor must have thought 'bloody actors!'. The scene has to be safe, and it has to be believable, and it is both."

Once 'dead', Lucy must then lie still for 20 minutes, as the play continues around, while she thinks of....? "I just keep saying 'relax'. You don't concentrate on the scene or you'd become involved, so you just meditate or float off ."

Twice now in her only two performances so far on the Theatre Royal main stage, Lucy's character ends up dead: "I had my throat slit by Milady De Winter when Constance ran away to the nunnery in The Three Musketeers, and now this! What next?!"

York Theatre Royal and Bolton Octagon's co-production of Of Mice And Men runs at York Theatre Royal until March 16. Box office: 01904 623568.

Updated: 09:04 Friday, March 01, 2002