IRISH actor David Ganly has returned to the West Yorkshire Playhouse to play the lead role in Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya with fond memories of his last appearance at the Leeds theatre six years ago.

“I played the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard Of Oz, with Rachel Kavanagh directing it,” he recalls. “We did it over Christmas and it was terrific. It was also good training for me because I ended up playing the same part at the Palladium for 15 months, so Leeds was the training ground for that.”

Chekhov’s Russian drama is being staged at the Playhouse for the first timein a newly commissioned version by playwright Samuel Adamson, directed by associate director Mark Rosenblatt.

David will lead the ensemble cast in this darkly humorous, romantic exploration of cross-purposed love, bitter jealousy and family dysfunction, playing Vanya for the first time too.

“It’s one of those seminal roles that most actors don’t get to play until their late-50s,” he says. “I’m 45 and it’s interesting because Vanya was written as a 47-year-old, struggling on a small salary on the family farm, yet invariably he’s played as if he were older.

“With things as they are now, gone are the days of a job for life, and I’m aware of friends having breakdowns. The mid-life crisis is coming earlier; suicide rates for men in their early forties have never been higher.”

You may be surprised but David can see a link between the Cowardly Lion and Vanya.

“Both my parts in Uncle Vanya and The Wizard Of Oz involve a coward finding his voice, and with Vanya being younger in this adaptation, it’s a visceral response rather than an intellectual one,” he says. “It’s funny to watch someone in turmoil, doing the kind of things where it’s almost like an extended-family Christmas dinner where a load of stuff comes out that’s normally said.”

Contrary to the notion that Chekhov’s plays are grey and miserable, David points out: “Chekhov called Uncle Vanya a comedy, and the key to my Vanya is that he’s an everyman. All of us in either our personal or professional lives have felt overlooked, whether we’ve been overlooked in our jobs or gazumped in matters of the heart.

“Everyone who puts their heart on the line is open to ridicule, and I am chuffed that we’ve done what Chekhov wants you to do with this play, which is to look at ourselves by holding up a mirror.”

• Uncle Vanya runs at West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds, until March 21. Box office: 0113 213 7700 or at wyp.org.uk