WHY is Imogen Stubbs playing the Duchess in John Webster's epic revenge tragedy The Duchess Of Malfi at the West Yorkshire Playhouse?

"Partly, life-wise, it worked out for me as it's a really short run in Leeds, whereas normally things have a length of run that I can't get away from home for," says the Northumberland-born actress with the southern marital life.

"But it's also a fantastically difficult part I really wanted to do, and I knew the director, Philip Franks, whose work I like very much. I knew him at university Oxford, and he's so very bright.

"A lot of directors take themselves seriously and are earnest, but Philip is incredibly funny and if you're going to be away from home, how nice to work with someone so sharp.

"When you take on a role, you entrust yourself to the director, you entrust yourself to their taste and I'm very happy to do that with Philip."

Franks has transferred the play's setting from Jacobean times to the Italy of the 1950s, as the country throws off its fascist past.

"That said, it's not La Dolce Vita with me frolicking with enormous breasts like Anita Ekberg in the Tivoli Fountain - though I do splash myself with some water on my relatively small but still proud breasts!" says Imogen.

"This is the Fifties Italy where women are in a society that's still controlled by men, and her brothers refuse to let the Duchess re-marry. Men dominating women had certainly not gone away by the 1950s, and in The Duchess Of Malfi the brothers are pretty deranged anyway, so their actions don't have to be justified by a religious context."

Analysing Philip's period setting further, she adds: "We're doing it because it's what he wants to do and maybe he would feel period bound in very expensive, spectacular Jacobean costumes. In the Quarry Theatre, you would be aware of its being a period play in a modern theatre. It looks better in the 1950s: it's a stylish look and you can wear dark glasses and smoke cigarettes - and there's the advantage that you don't have huge, heavy costumes."

The defiant Duchess is one of those signature roles for premier league actresses.

"I just wanted to have a go and she's completely unlike anything I've ever done before," says Imogen.

"Sometimes with Shakespearean characters, they carry the baggage of who has played them before and the history that surrounds that. With Webster's play, there's less history to it but it's certainly been played by some spectacular actresses."

The Duchess Of Malfi, West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds, tomorrow until November 11. Box office: 0113 213 7700.