YORK theatre companies are always looking to nurture new talent, usually for the acting or musician ranks, sometimes through establishing youth theatres, other times by spreading the range of productions. More unusual, however, is the opportunity to try out directorial skills.

Rowntree Players have found a way to facilitate that chance for the first time by staging three of Alan Bennett's Talking Heads monologues, teaming first-time directors with established Players actors.

Each monologue utilises the same set of a bed, two sofas, an armchair and a table and chairs; each is accompanied by recorded music between scenes, selected by each director, and there is a ten-minute interval between the first and second monologues and again between the second and third, to allow the audience to sharpen up again for the next instalment of Bennett's rich language.

First presented on television in 1988, the Talking Heads monologues are now performed regularly on stage in clusters of three: the ideal configuration to provide contrast while sustaining focus.

Your reviewer attended Thursday's dress rehearsal, where Sara Howlett brought a lovely air of relaxation to playing Lesley, the naive, nay gullible, actress whose delusions of grandeur lead her blindly into the world of pornography in Her Big Chance. There is a lightness of touch to Tamsin Winstanley's direction that adds to the knowing humour.

Andy Welch tends to play the villain in the Rowntree pantomime, always with exaggerated vocal and comic panache, and his role as the pessimistic grump Graham Whittaker, still tied to his mother's apron strings, now lets him show another side. More than one side, as he not only echoes Bennett's own turn as Graham, but also shows his dexterous aplomb for accents, mimicry and a more subtle expression of darkness, playing everyone else too in A Chip In The Sugar. Finn Ella's direction has the pacing and nuances just right.

Last up is the mysterious and not a little troubling Soldiering On, wherein Beryl Nairn's Muriel Carpenter must put on a front while knowing her late husband was hiding secrets. Humour takes a hike, the plot thickens, the air chills as the truth dawns, under Simon Alnaimi's sleight-of-hand direction.

Rowntree Players present Talking Heads, Joseph Rowntree Theatre, York, tonight at 7.30pm, tomorrow, 2.30pm and 7.30pm. Box office: 01904 501935 or at josephrowntreetheatre.co.uk