King Lear, English Touring Theatre, York Theatre Royal, November 26 to 30. Box office: 01904 623568.

KING Lear cannot be conquered. Ask Timothy West, who is portraying Shakespeare's king of kings for the third time in 31 years.

"I think there's nothing quite like it as a part, nothing that's quite so big a challenge. You know you're never really going to get to the top, though sometimes you feel you're on the foothills or you've got some way up the climb, but never the top," says West, who will be leading the English Touring Theatre's cast at York Theatre Royal next week.

Most familiar from his television repertoire of bullies, bounders and booming bigwigs, from Bradley Hardacre in Brass to Winston Churchill and Edward the Seventh, West first played Lear at only 37 for the Prospect Theatre Company, touring Australia and transferring to the Aldwych in London.

By any standards, he was young for the role, barely half way to the four score years that Lear himself mentions, but then it fitted in with a career path of playing the "red wine parts" of Lear, Macbeth, Prospero, Claudius and Shylock, not the "white wine parts" of Hamlet, Richard II and Romeo.

"I was made up to look older which they don't have to do now. The role is a wonder because you see more in it each time, but I'm a different actor to when I was 37 and had two children aged three and five. Now they are grown up and I have grandchildren which gives me a different attitude on life."

His second Lear came his way almost ten years ago, for a small troupe in Dublin by the apt name of the Second Age Company at the Tivoli Theatre.

Why is West taking on Lear for a third time, a third age?

"I've worked with English Touring Theatre before and they had a little more money at the beginning of the year than usual - though they're not spending it on me, I might add - after a successful Peter Gill play. So I was asked what would I like to do, and I always felt Lear was a play you could come back to do again with new ideas."

West is at the Gala Theatre in Durham this week, in week nine of a 12-week tour that has confirmed his instinct to play Lear again was spot on.

"Every time you do a play again, you're looking at it in a different way, with different actors around you, and a different director Stephen Unwin and designer with different ideas," he says. "You've changed and so has the world around you, but if you were to start with a completely clean sheet you wouldn't get to the stage in four weeks, so certain things stick with you from before. Lear unfolds new meanings every time you play it."

West believes he is the right age to play Lear. "If Lear is played too old and too enfeebled to continue to do his job, then the play becomes a tragedy of old age and filial lack of attention, which is not the full play."

Lear, you will recall, foolishly divides his kingdom between his two eldest daughters, punishing his youngest, Cordelia, the one child who truly loves him.

Is Lear mad or maddening? "That's an interesting question in that he has to be a culpable man because he gives up the reins of power when he still has the vigour to do it. He has done that thing that Shakespeare never forgives: wanting to be treated like a king without doing any of the work."

West must know Lear well by now but is it possible to know him wholly?

"I have to believe that I do know him and what stands in the way very often is that feeling you have to play him as this extraordinary king and that's not my kind of acting," he says. "I have to look at the man and, after all, kings are men and the clue is to try to know what this madness is and find a clinical explanation to it that is borne out in the text."

West did his research into Lear's state of mind and body.

"When I played Lear the first time I went to see a geriatric specialist, who said he knew Lear's condition was arteriosclerosis the hardening of the arteries. Once I had read up the symptoms they do explain a lot of Lear's behaviour, and as an actor, if you get a medical tick box like that, it gives you an enormous authority - and what had impressed me most was that this medical man had truly read the play."

Not that West has based his interpretation of Lear entirely on one man's medical theory. "It was a kind of detective story that he had worked on but it's only one element to a part that gives you jumping-off places, and they change every night. In a role like Lear, where so many things happen to you, the risk is predicting them. You always must treat them as if they are happening for the first time, so that things take you by surprise."

A tenuous link can be made between the mental states of Lear and West's part in BBC1's Bedtime Stories, playing Andrew Oldfield, who believes Alzheimer's disease is creeping in.

"There is a thread," he says. "I think that people who for some reason are suffering a crisis of confidence at that kind of age do share these feelings. It's not long ago that Alzheimer's was given a name but people in middle age have long had a fear about losing their memory and suddenly not being able to grab a word they have always known.

"That fear grabs Lear as it grabs Andrew Oldfield, but Lear is not paranoid in the way that Oldfield is - though I do think it's affecting me too. I worry about thinking that the cracks in the wall are getting bigger and that traffic is sounding louder outside!"

West, who is married to actress Prunella Scales, is very much a family man, proud of the burgeoning acting career of their son Sam. "The main lesson we acquire from Lear and indeed the parallel figure of Gloucester, is to learn how to love and judge your children, and they both make disastrous choices about their children: so there's a lesson to be learnt about inter-generation relationships.

"If you behave without consideration as an adult or child, it's very easy to divide each other and not only is that very sad but it's happening more and more in this generation."

A salutary lesson indeed.

King Lear, English Touring Theatre, York Theatre Royal, November 26 to 30. Box office: 01904 623568.

Updated: 09:51 Friday, November 22, 2002