LORNE Campbell first met York Theatre Royal artistic director Damian Cruden when studying for his Masters at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama. Now Lorne is bringing his production of Ariel Dorfman's Death And The Maiden to the Theatre Royal Studio from May 28 to June 15.

"Damian was the external examiner on my course, and he invited me to come and do a month's observation, assisting him on The Three Musketeers last summer," recalls Lorne. "Through that I wangled an agreement to bring a show to York."

Scotsman Lorne, 25, is the director of Forge Theatre Company, the Edinburgh company he set up in 1997, initially for theatre in education work, after studying drama at Liverpool John Moores University.

Death And The Maiden, the company's first small-scale tour with cross-border visits to Newcastle and York, forms his final Forge show before he moves to the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh in July for a year under the Channel 4 Regional Theatre Directors Scheme.

Dorfman's psychologically menacing play, best known for Roman Polanski's 1995 film version starring Sigourney Weaver and Ben Kingsley, is a revenge thriller set in a South American country where Paulina Escobar suffered at the hands of her captors in order to protect the man she loved. On becoming aware that the man who raped and tortured her under that regime is now her neighbour, she fights for personal justice, driven by anger to put him on trial for his crimes.

"The atmosphere is very claustrophobic in this piece, so it makes for a wonderful Studio show," says Lorne. "Because you can get the audience so close to the actors, a lot of the time you can get the audience to see the play from the characters' point of view, and in this piece the actors really act upon each other. It's like a chemical reaction."

For tickets, ring 01904 623568.

Updated: 09:04 Friday, May 24, 2002