ARTS / Small, but perfectly deformed: Show People 68. Simon Russell Beale

SIMON RUSSELL BEALE bounds across the foyer of the RSC's overheated rehearsal building in Clapham, hot, clammy and pleased as Punch. He has just spent two hours scampering about on all fours and rolling on a hard floor, and nothing happened. Not a twinge. Beale, and the entire company hierarchy, can breathe again.

He has had a winter of discontent. Buoyed by brilliant notices for his Richard III in Sam Mendes's production, he headed the company on its 12-week provincial tour, an exhausting schedule, with a 'bag of sweeties at the end' - a comfy seven weeks playing the part at Mendes's own small London theatre, the Donmar Warehouse, followed by a trip to Japan. After one preview performance at the Donmar, however, Beale's back went. Suddenly, dramatically and publicly, celebrating over supper at The Ivy, 'It just went phrrrrck'. He was immobilised, hospitalised, operated on, then forced to lie flat indefinitely. But give up his crown without a fight? Nay.

On his back, he begged and wheedled to be allowed to continue. Beale says he drove Mendes to near-distraction by ringing him three times a day when the director was trying to head off financial disaster and also run in two new Richards in a week: first Beale's understudy, then Ciaran Hinds, who, it was hoped, was enough of a pull to keep the Donmar from going under. Harsh words were exchanged. Couldn't I come back for the final week, Beale pleaded? No. He was sure he would be on his feet in time for Japan. No. For God's sake rest and get better, said Mendes. Beale accepted defeat.

The final blow was that in failing to play London, the 32-year-old Beale was disqualified from the major critics' awards - an indictment of how Londocentric theatre is. He would almost certainly have been wreathed in honours. His Richard, a bulky, shaven-headed homunculus of concentrated evil, had the critics hopping with superlatives: 'electrifying', 'volcanic'. Beale had succeeded in laying the ghosts of other great Richards, especially Olivier's, with its insidious nasal whine. He uses his own voice - a rich, classically honed instrument - which he artfully curls in a particularly nasty suggestion of camp. He has also perfected a way of fluttering his eyes up under their lids so that the irises disappear.

In hospital, just before the back operation, 'I told them, as part of my job, I'd been wearing a built-up shoe for the last two years. The consultant gaped: 'And you wonder why your back's buggered'.'

The physical preparation is the easy bit, he says. At drama school - the GSMD, where he went after taking a First in English at Cambridge - 'they used to send us out to study an animal at London Zoo - I chose a wild pig - then you had to be that animal in class for two hours. Sounds daft. But subliminally, that's almost always how I work. And the great thing about Richard is that you have so many to choose from. Tony (Sher) chose spider. I chose toad.'

He has been described, more than once, as ugly, and friends say he is morbidly sensitive about it, especially as his talented medical / musical family includes three tall, lean brothers. Small, he is certainly no oil painting, but it's the way he uses that neck, that nose, and a naturally shambling gait that turns typecasting into art. He first caught the eye when he played three RSC Restoration fops in a row. He managed to make the audience ache with mirth while also feeling the loneliness of the self-obsessed. He could have got stuck with camp - he is famous for his pranks offstage, and made a horribly funny Thersites in Troilus and Cressida - but eased himself out with his half-pansy, half-tragic Edward II. Konstantin in Chekhov's Seagull established his range once and for all. The audience left in tears every night.

Now he has one foot on the top rung: he became an RSC Associate last year. Which parts does he hanker after? Hamlet, of course, which is on the cards ('can't talk about it yet'). 'But actually I'm thinking of doing something quite different.' Not quitting altogether? Yes, he says sanguinely, he has been back to his old college and talked about a second degree, in medieval history.

His boss, Adrian Noble, is equally sanguine when given this news. 'Ha, Simon,' he says, as if he's thought this one through. 'His strength lies in his contradictions. His romantic leaning goes against his physiognomy. He's fiercely intelligent yet he plays instinctively on the level of the shop floor.'

This season he plays Edgar in Noble's Lear, a syphilitic roue in Ibsen's Ghosts, and a podgy Ariel in The Tempest, a casting that will make sense when Beale breaks into song in his ravishing light tenor. One thing is certain. None of his characters will limp.

'Richard III' reopens at the Swan, Stratford (0789 295623) on Thursday.