Painting the Town Redgrave

Despite a varied, protean life before the camera -- she's played both Mary, Queen of Scots, and Renee Richards, the transgender tennis player -- Redgrave always returns to theater. "It's acquired a significance for me now," she says. "It's the only place left open to all and everybody, where for 1 1/2 hours you can sit quietly and listen and think. I think we're in desperate need of reflection and thought and stillness. Where else is there?"

To spend an hour with Redgrave is instructive, in a literal sense. Behind those astounding eyes pulses a lively intellect. You can imagine her having lived a full life at a university. "I give quite interesting master classes," she acknowledges. She likes to look at the world in novel ways. On a visit to Washington several years ago, she says, she went to a Picasso exhibition, and decided that instead of briskly gliding through, she'd concentrate on a single picture for 45 minutes. "It was a tiny painting of a girl in a little attic room, and a man," she says. "It was very small, 12 inches by 6.

"It wasn't until the end of 45 minutes that I really saw that picture -- it was brilliant."

Though one of her early breakthroughs was a classical performance -- her Rosalind in a 1961 RSC production of Shakespeare's "As You Like It" is still held up as a modern benchmark for the role -- the actress hasn't done much of the Greeks. In the late '50s, she played Aphrodite in a repertory theater in Surrey, and then, in 1971, she was Andromache to Katharine Hepburn's Hecuba in the film "The Trojan Women," directed by Michael Cacoyannis.

Rehearsing "Hecuba," she feels as if it's still the first day of school. "It's been a fantastic learning experience, beginning with the A-B-C level." She takes a puff of her cigarette. "It's like looking at one painting for 45 minutes."

She sees, too, relevance in the kind of civilization the Greeks established, and the role their theater played, as a challenge to the conscience. "What theater was about was making people ask questions about their lives, their society, their ideas and visions for society," she says.

This "Hecuba" seeks to provoke some of these same questions. In his translation, Harrison uses a loaded term to describe the Greek armies that attack Troy. "I call it the Greek 'coalition,' " he says. "The Greece that invaded Troy was not Greece but a collection of cities, Athens, Sparta. So it's an accurate word." The allusion is clear. Harrison adds, "I couldn't say, 'Let's set the whole thing in Iraq,' but I've nudged it in that direction."

Redgrave approves. "My generation was taught that democracy began in Greece, and there has been considerable reason to go into what democracy means today, since in our time governments have ridden roughshod over the law. The play is about a search for justice, for retribution. So the questions Euripides is inquiring about are very real."

The actress's salad is only half-eaten when a woman from the company gingerly approaches to tell her rehearsals are resuming. In a sudden burst of panic, Redgrave attacks her lunch.

She's unnerved by the idea of a kink in the machinery of creativity. Making a few final passes at the chunks of tuna, she looks charmingly rattled. "I can't bear them to wait five minutes," she says to no one in particular.