If you had a suave, elegant or debonaire character to cast, and wanted the best, you’d be on the phone to Peter Bowles’s agent, if possible by yesterday. Yet anyone who saw him as a sleazy criminal in Alan Ayckbourn’s Man of the Moment or any of several other dark and difficult characters, will know that his range is far greater than his default image. And here he is again, defying shallow expectation twice: briefly as a boozy, distraught actor in Chekhov’s Swan Song, then as the desiccated schoolmaster in Rattigan’s Browning Version.

On the face of it, Andrew Crocker-Harris is a pitiable figure. He is about to leave his job in a public school unmourned and without a pension, but with a wife who despises him and, as he knows, is sleeping with a young science master. Yet Bowles never seeks pity or pathos. Not for a moment is there anything soft, sentimental or ingratiating in his performance. His Crocker-Harris even reacts with bleak calm to the discovery that some call him the Himmler of the lower fifth. The walls around this punctilious, exacting, almost wilfully unlovable man have become so impenetrable that everyone, including himself, thinks they hide a corpse.

Except they don’t, quite. You can see that in the joy that Bowles hints that he still feels for the Classics he teaches. And then, as shockingly to us as to him, a boy’s gift of Browning’s translation of Aeschylus’s Agamemnon reduces him to sudden, choking sobs. Thanks to his wife’s insinuation that this was a sly bribe, he retreats to the safety of his emotional Antarctica, yet something has changed. The Bowles who ends Peter Hall’s production still looks as if his spine has been iced up, still seems aloof and alone, but there is just a touch of a thaw.

It is delicately judged and, as if to demonstrate his versatility, it is preceded by a great splurge of indelicacy. Chekhov’s aged Svetlovidov, looking as if he has emerged from a props basket, blunders onstage after finding himself dumped in his dressing room after his benefit performance. He is drunk, self-pitying, angry, wistful. He bewails his loneliness, emotional failures and supposedly misspent life with a fervour that may be real, may be thesp posture. It is Bowles’s achievement to keep us, and probably himself, guessing what, if anything, he feels. But does this matter? At the end, aided by a maudlin prompter, he launches into passionate extracts from Lear, Othello, Pushkin. And that is what both Svetlovidov and Bowles are: true actors.

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