A broadside from the king of the North

In the new cast of Northern Broadsides' award-winning A Midsummer Night's Dream, the first fairy is a fruit-and-veg man. More than that, David Peacock is the only living actor with his name permanently on show in Shaftesbury Avenue. "The other is Sir John Gielgud. The only difference is that he has a theatre named after him, and my name's on my fruit stall at Cambridge Circus."

While the theatrical knight's Shakespearian interpretations have undoubtedly been earthy on occasions, I doubt if there has been anything to compare with the sight of chunky Peacock making his stage debut performing a stick dance with Broadsides' well-rounded and much-hallowed Bottom, John Branwell.

To the rhythms of their sticks and the fairy folk band, they twist and turn each other, eyeballs in constant contact. There is nothing undignified about the dance; at times it's only a short remove from the charged eroticism of a Polynesian line dance, where corpulence is everything. This is England, though, and vulgarity will out: sticks are thrust at bottoms and a provocatively tender world becomes, in an instant, rumbustious and self-mocking.

It is a vision entirely in keeping with Northern Broadsides' revisionist approach to Shakespeare, which is more than the sum of the actors' accents. The use of wholesome vowels certainly liberates the cast. John Branwell, rarely out of work in the country's larger theatres, is delighted to play Bottom in his native West Yorkshire voice. "It's such a relief not to have to concentrate on speaking the lines beautifully," he says. David Peacock comes from Hackney and owes the natural, northern voice of his fairy to an itinerant childhood, but all the other actors hail from Yorkshire or Lancashire - and Hull, of course, which was at least in Yorkshire when the artistic director Barrie Rutter grew up there, son of a fish filleter.

The confidence and will to work in dialect comes, he says, from his collaborations with the poet Tony Harrison at Salts Mill in Bradford. "I hate the stuttering carburettor prevalent in much classical acting," Rutter says. "But our work goes further than a reassessment of accent. All Broadsides productions, Shakespeare or Kleist or whatever, are infused with northern energy. You couldn't do what we do from Somerset. You could apply the same principles, but you'd get a different body of work, because the cultural baggage is different."

In rehearsal, Rutter goes for clarity, good story-telling and no interference with the text. Design and lighting are minimal. He acts in almost all the productions. "Though I have begun to direct, my juices are as an actor, and I can't imagine not doing it."

Though off-stage he is undoubtedly the leader of the pack, Rutter's own performances are considered generous by the rest of the company. In rehearsal, everyone is encouraged to help shape the production. His trust in Shakespeare is absolute. "Don't worry about that," he'll say sometimes, when an actor hesitates. "Listen to the words and Shakespeare will do it for you." And working with the four young lovers: "Don't be put off by the iambic pentameter; it's not an invention to make our lives a misery. It comes straight from the streets. It's the people's rhythms, formalised so that the language can call attention to itself.

"Don't think you have to speak politely. When they dug up the Rose Theatre, they found tons of nutshells, put there to stem the quagmire of an open sewer up against the stage. You can't tell me that the theatre was a quiet and reverent place to be!"

There is no hint of introspection in Broadsides, no wondering why a character thinks this way or acts that way. "What matters is not why or how a character does something. I hate psychology in theatre. I go for attitude every time, and for status and hierarchy within scenes." The particular social history and persistent hierarchies of England mean most of us can accept northern voices among Shakespeare's mechanicals, but somehow kings and queens ought to talk posh.

Rutter, who's playing Theseus / Oberon in his own production, couldn't speak RP English if he tried. "It's a kind of speech that was appropriated 100 years ago, along with the assumption that it was somehow more correct and authoritative. We still can't shake it off. Of course you can be a northern king. Don't question it. Just do it. And do it with passion."

Rutter's Theseus / Oberon is matched by fellow Humbersider Ishia Bennison's Hippolyta / Titania. Theirs is an eyeball-to-eyeball partnership on stage, too, electrifying and cerebral and a solid base on which to build Antony and Cleopatra, which follows Dream on tour in September. "It comes from mutual respect," says Rutter: "the focus and the passion emerge via the language and each other's eyeballs. It has nothing to do with display. I hate to see sex on stage, not because I'm a prude - God forbid - but because it's just not necessary. The script of Antony and Cleopatra mentions two kisses; there's no need for more and yet, over and over again, that play is performed indulgently."

Rutter tells me this on a park bench during a break from rehearsals. He repeats it in a slightly different context an hour later. Titania sprawls seductively on a wooden trolley. She is enamoured of an ass. Bottom aims to please, but is totally bewildered. "The truth is," Rutter roars from the side, "he doesn't know what the hell is going on or who he's talking to. All he knows is that he's a weaver from Huddersfield and he's going to sing at St Paul's."

The cast relaxes; an anecdote is imminent. "It bores me rigid whenever I see sex in this play. Last time was at the Barbican. All that in and out and through a pair of trousers, too. I caught myself looking in the mirror afterwards, thinking that's not how you do it. All that money, all those star names and they still can't get it right."

In fact, Northern Broadsides beat the RSC to the 1994 Shakespeare Globe award with this very production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Rutter is not angry at the existence of the RSC, simply at its monopoly of resources and public attention. He's angry because a single weak production would mean catastrophe for Northern Broadsides, while the RSC, he says, survives disasters at an alarming rate.

"Look at the recent Macbeth; what a dog's dinner. True, it wiped out some of the RSC deficit, but who wouldn't like the opportunity of massive back-up, royal patronage, knight-of-the-realm leading actor and West End money-bags support to help get them out of trouble." The entire production budget for Broadsides' tour is pounds 15,000.

All the actors and crew have donated their holidays to the India Fund, since the company hopes to visit Delhi in November. Even surpluses from the weekly tea and coffee bill are being diverted for India.

Though many other production decisions are dictated by poverty, there is a sense in which the lack of massive material resources is as liberating as the freedom from elocuted English. "In Look Back in Anger, you have to have that ironing board," Rutter says. "In my type of theatre, I can take that chair or this park bench and christen it a chariot. What matters is getting access to the imagination. That's all I do. All the same, I could do without quite so much of a struggle."

n To Sat, Theatre Royal, Bath (01225 448844), then on tour to: Cannizaro Park, Wimbledon (0181-540 0362); Marlowe, Canterbury (01227 787787); Playhouse, Oxford (01865 798600); and Viaduct, Halifax (01422 344555)