As The Three Musketeers prepare to come crashing into York Theatre Royal,

CHARLES HUTCHINSON hears tales of beards, bravery and a wicked woman

FOR all that bullish testosterone zapping around in The Three Musketeers at York Theatre Royal from tomorrow, there will be no one tougher than Phoebe Soteriades's Milady de Winter.

Phoebe returns to the Theatre Royal stage for the first time since April 1999 when she played the hardest nut to crack in the Oxford Stage Company production of Junk, a Faustian journey into the teenage drug culture.

"I played Lily, she was the worst addict of them all, the one who encouraged all the others to become addicts. At the end she has a baby, and you see her rubbing heroin on the baby's lips to calm it," she recalls. "Yes, Lily was the worst witch."

As is his way, Theatre Royal artistic director Damian Cruden noted her performance and stored it away in his memory bank for a future play day. Phoebe, meanwhile, recalls leaving all her details at the stage door, knowing the Theatre Royal was a producing house and hopeful that an opportunity might come her way.

It duly did but, as it happens, she did not audition specifically for The Three Musketeers. "I actually auditioned for the ensemble for the three plays coming up later this year, but it was a very relaxed meeting and it opened out into seeing if we could work well together: it was a chance to learn something about each other," Phoebe says.

It was one of those auditions where if it did not work out for a particular role, another chance might come her way. "So, when the role of Milady was offered I wasn't about to turn it down. I thought 'Yeah, great!'"

There was an intensity and wildness to Phoebe's portrayal of Lily that is suited equally to playing Milady de Winter, the bete noire of the musketeers in Alexandre Dumas's swashbuckling French adventures.

Phoebe sums up Milady in one word, without hesitation. "Exciting!" she says. "She's one of those villains who's almost the archetypal female baddie, because she's had such an awful history and she's been branded, as a convicted prostitute among other numerous crimes she's committed.

"She's come from absolute poverty to try and improve herself but when her husband, Athos, discovers that his 'innocent bride' had been making fair trade of herself, he strips her naked and suspends her from a tree, and that turns her. From that moment, she is out for revenge: and a woman doing that, especially a woman from the lower classes, was unheard of."

When preparing for the role at home in Finsbury Park, London, Phoebe decided not to watch any of the Three Musketeers films. Instead she concentrated on reading Dumas's stories to assess the personality of Milady. She noted a fatalist dimension to her. "Milady is someone who, to some extent, is already dead having been branded: anything after that is a bonus, so she flies into everything 100 per cent," says Phoebe.

"She's honed all her womanly wiles, all her methods, and has that quality of feeling she's living on bonus time, and that's a terrifying quality because you sense she'll stop at nothing."

Such roles have a habit of coming Phoebe's way. Take, for example, Bianca in Shakespeare's The Taming Of The Shrew, another credit on the Soteriades CV. "She's just such an odd fish, an outwardly prim and proper lady, but in the end you think she's the shrew, she's the right little madam. What you see at first is not what you get, and Milady is similar to her in that the audience gets to see both sides of her."

So, watch out for Phoebe Soteriades: her de Winter of discontent is up for a fight from tomorrow.

...and a fuzzy face for all

BEARDS, beards and more beards. They are spreading fast at York Theatre Royal, where even artistic director Damian Cruden has embraced the team-bonding cry of "One for all and all for one" by sprouting a goatee for the first time since the November 1998 production of Bouncers (when he did so in case he needed to step into one of the roles).

At the time of interviewing the Three Musketeers and their apprentice D'Artagnan, John Paul Connolly (Porthos) was sporting a goatee (his regular facial look); Tim Welton (Athos) was cultivating a beard and luxuriant moustache; new RADA graduate Oliver Boot (Aramis) was developing a fashionably trim boy-band beard and John Kirk (D'Artagnan) had lost-weekend stubble, later to be cut back to a goatee. It was the Seventies of The Eagles and Lynyrd Skynyrd all over again.

"It's camaraderie," says John, and that camaraderie stretches beyond beard growing to sword fighting too. The Theatre Royal musketeers - who strangely never use a musket despite their name - have been working every day with fight director Richard Ryan, the Master of Arms at RADA, to perfect their swashbuckling swordplay.

Oliver Boot is too modest to mention it, so his cohorts do so for him: he is a particularly good swordsman. "I used to do some competition fencing," says Oliver, taking up the story. "I started fencing at about ten...

"...And he finished at about 10.30," says John, cutting in.

Not to be knocked off his stride ahead of his professional stage debut, Oliver continues: "I did regional championship fencing in Hertfordshire, where I went to school, but then I got Osgood Schlatter's Knee, which is something to do with the legs muscling up too quickly and the body not being able to put up with it, so I had to stop."

Nevertheless, it was not enough to stop him winning the fighting skills prize at RADA, a prize that had been won by Tim Welton and John Paul Connolly in their time at RADA too.

Not to be left out, what about John Kirk? "I went to Mountview, where they stopped the sword-fighting side of things the year I started, so the first sword fighting I did was here, at the Theatre Royal, in Romeo And Juliet two years ago, when I played Mercutio... with a beard!"

For all the Musketeers' joshing and joking in the interview, Damian Cruden's production will be darker than the films. "It stops us from getting into all that thigh-slapping stuff!" says Tim.

Tickets: £7 to £15, with concessions available; ring 01904 623568.