MAXINE Peake has a confession to make. “I’ve never done a Terence Rattigan play, and if I’m honest, I’ve never read any of his plays either,” says the Lancastrian actress, who will break her Rattigan duck tonight in Leeds when she opens in the role of Hester in The Deep Blue Sea.

This will be the launch of the West Yorkshire Playhouse’s celebrations to Mark Rattigan’s centenary and maybe restore him to prominence once more.

“He certainly went very out of fashion in the late 1950s with the rise of the Royal Court and the Angry Young Brigade, but reading this play in hindsight, it’s a very human story,” says Maxine, “What’s the difference from those late-Fifties plays? When I went to see Look Back In Anger, I thought, ‘Oh, this is dated’.”

Rattigan’s play, written in 1952, depicts Hester leaving her husband for another man, swapping a well-respected judge for wild, unpredictable, sexy Freddie, an ex-fighter pilot, but now she has reached the end of the line with him too.

“It’s the themes that resonate in Rattigan’s play,” says Maxine. “It’s about society and social etiquette and how people were restricted by that, but it doesn’t feel like a problem that it’s set in 1952, as it’s a story of love and the outsider.”

Given her television roles in dinnerladies and Shameless and her performance as Moors Murderer Myra Hindley, Maxine’s appearance as a clergyman’s daughter, moving in high-society circles with a High Court judge, might seem surprising.

“Yes, it was a fascinating choice!” she says.

“It’s the first time I’ve played a character like this, and at first I was thinking, ‘Why did Sarah [director Sarah Esdaile] offer this to me?’, but she said she felt I could bring an emotional intensity to it.

“A few years ago, I don’t think I would have been at the top of anyone’s list for The Deep Blue Sea, so I thought, ‘OK, people now think I can do this’. I said, ‘Let me read it’, and then met Sarah in Manchester for two minutes and went, ‘Right, she’s brilliant, I’m playing her’.”

Hester will be new territory for Maxine.

“What attracts me to roles like this is doing something I’ve not done before,” she says. “It’s about stretching yourself as an actress and learning,” she says. “I’m desperate to keep learning.”

While on the subject of being desperate, Hester hits desperation point in Rattigan’s play: a moment that will strike home strongest. “The spirit of survival gets her through it, but you see the self-knowledge and the low self-esteem that often comes into play in destructive relationships. So it does seem timeless,” says Maxine.

She is enjoying speaking Rattigan’s language. “It’s clipped and a bit more muscular, and the way they say words is more expressive than now. There’s a real tune to it, it’s quite melodic, and it’s good fun to get your mouth round,” she says.

“You have to be a little bit more precise, finishing the words off, as they really use the language to express themselves. Now we’re quite lazy and there’s not much grace any more, is there?”

• The Deep Blue Sea will run at the West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds, from tonight until March 12. Box office: 0113 213 7700 or wyp.org.uk

* Maxine Peake will play hotshot barrister Martha Costello in Silk on BBC1 on Tuesdays from February 22.