Stepping back in time

If this sounds like some common or garden bourgeois adultery yarn, think again. Pinter adds spice to a story that looked to his own extra-marital affair with writer and broadcaster Joan Bakewell for inspiration by having the action move backwards in time. This dramatic device lets the audience in on a complex web of secrets and lies told in Pinter's elliptical pared-back style.

"It's a lot harder than I thought it would be," MacAninch admits about the first Citizens production to be directed by its new artistic director Dominic Hill. "One of the things is the precision of the language. It's a lot more poetic than one would think it is, so you can't really paraphrase your way out of trouble. It's very important that the words and the pauses are exactly right."

As for his character Robert, MacAninch's own brooding intensity, which comes across in the seriousness with which he talks about his craft, sounds ideal. "He finds out there's been a great betrayal in his life," MacAninch says, "and he makes a very particular decision about that, which is very unexpected. That impacts on everyone around him for the rest of his life. So it's about trying to understand why he does that, and that's very much Pinter territory because it's about finding out that someone has power over you and how you deal with that, and figuring out how you can have power over them. Robert chooses a very clever but quite destructive way of dealing with it, I think."

Such onstage shenanigans are a far cry from Downton Abbey. "I absolutely loved it right from the audition onwards," he says of the ITV drama, "I'd never seen the programme but I'd worked with the producer about 20 years ago and straight away it felt great. Then I watched the programme, not expecting very much. I just thought it'd be another Sunday night drama, which doesn't fill me with very much enthusiasm, but I watched the whole series over two nights and I thought, this is quite good."

Considering just how much Downton has tapped into the public consciousness, this is something of an under-statement. "I don't know what it's captured in terms of the psyche of the nation," he says, "but I certainly know that it's a beautifully shot piece of work, in which the acting is pretty good. It's very character driven and they kept throwing surprises in, like making the footman gay. One minute you think you're in this cosy little thing and then it becomes something completely different."

One could argue the same about Betrayal. "Some people say it's a 1970s play," MacAninch observes, "but I think it's more personal than that. It's timeless."

MacAninch's stint in Betrayal will see the now Edinburgh-based actor return to the theatre where his career began as an extra on a production of Schiller's Mary Stuart. That was in 1985 when he was a student at Glasgow University, getting a distinction in philosophy while failing English and French in his first year. When a friendly lecturer suggested he try drama because it was easy to make up academic points from the subject, MacAninch felt something light up inside him.

"When I first went onstage I was given a form of expression that I'd never had before," he says. "And I still feel that whenever I go onstage."

After graduating, MacAninch briefly attended Bristol Old Vic drama school but hated it. He wrote a letter to director and designer Phillip Prowse, one of the Citz's legendary triumvirate who ran the theatre with Giles Havergal and the late Robert David MacDonald for the best part of 30 years.

The letter was a request to audition for that year's season and he was duly cast in small roles in Tis Pity She's A Whore and Frankenstein. After that he appeared in A Tale of Two Cities, Prowse's production of Enrico 4 and Oedipus Rex.

MacAninch moved to London, where he spent a year doing telesales jobs between auditions and was eventually cast in Edinburgh-set legal drama The Advocates. More high profile TV and film work followed, including the Howard Schumann-scripted Nervous Energy, in which MacAninch played a young man with Aids. After watching it, Prowse asked his former extra to come back to the Citz to play Hamlet. He was the last actor to do so under the triumvirate. The first had been David Hayman, who also returns to the Citz this year playing the title role in Hill's forthcoming production of King Lear.

"That was a great homecoming," MacAninch says of Hamlet. "I didn't have many ambitions at the time. One was to work at the Citz, because it was a place I loved. The other was to play Hamlet but I never dreamed I would achieve both. Phillip Prowse was and still is a theatrical genius, so it was a great platform for me."

The last time MacAninch appeared at the Citz was in Roxana Silbert's production of Tom Murphy's play, A Whistle in the Dark. More recently he appeared with Alan Cumming in the National Theatre of Scotland's production of The Bacchae, as well as the NTS production of Peter Pan. He even appeared at Oran Mor in Paddy Cunneen's play, Wee Andy.

"I did three films and two TV shows in the last year," MacAninch says, "but I could barely pay the bills. So if that's going to be the case, then I would rather do theatre. I would still go to America if I got the call. Not out of ambition but just for the adventure. Otherwise, I'm quite happy being in Portobello with my family, who are the most important thing in my life."

Despite what he says, MacAninch sounds totally driven about what he does. Dominic Hill told him during rehearsals for Betrayal that it was watching him in a production of Anna Karenina, directed by Nancy Meckler for Shared Experience, that made him want to become a director.

As well as being a neat squaring of circles, Hill's observation catches a sense of how that drive translates onstage. Ask where it comes from, and MacAninch leaves a lengthy and suitably Pinteresque pause.

"Things keep popping up that don't do any good," he says eventually. He is wrestling with a set of acting truisms before hitting on the phrase, "To lose my sense of myself."

"I think when you're present to the story, you lose that sense of yourself and are totally in it and I love that feeling. It's very powerful. I feel very powerful, as a man and as an actor, because it makes you present to life. Like when I was climbing when I was making a TV show called Rockface, I was so present to life.

"It's a great ambition, to be present. It's the most fulfilling thing."

Betrayal, Citizens Theatre, Glasgow, March 2-24. Special 50p tickets for Betrayal go on sale on Saturday at 10am. Visit www.citz.co.uk.