IT is a sign of a very special play when an actor who has starred in as many different roles as David Horovitch desperately wants to be a part of it.

That is what happened in the case of Copenhagen, Michael Frayn's critically acclaimed play that will begin a two-week run at Malvern's Festival Theatre on August 22.

The production has run for more than two years in the West End, which is where Mr Horovitch first got to hear about it.

"I wrote to Michael Blakemore (the director) saying how much I would love to act in it if the opportunity ever arose," he said. "I then bumped into him quite by chance in the foyer of a cinema in Hampstead, where they were showing a film I was in.

"He didn't realise I was in it until I told him. When I did, he said 'Right, I'll regard it as an audition!' I got the letter offering me a part in the touring production a couple of weeks later."

Mr Horovitch is perhaps best known for his role as Inspector Slack in five TV episodes of Miss Marple. His many small-screen appearances include roles in Poirot, Bergerac, Casualty and The Bill. He has also starred in 102 Dalmatians, Dirty Dozen and the Oscar-nominated Solomon and Gaenor, his "audition" for Copenhagen.

Despite the fact that acting on TV and celluloid is much more lucrative, he admits that the stage will always be his first love.

"You get to tell the story to the audience in a way you don't in front of the camera," he said. "In TV and film it's the director who tells the story by the way he puts the takes together."

The immediacy and challenge of the theatre are certainly present in Copenhagen, which has a cast of just three people. Mr Horovitch, who pays Neils Bohr, admits it is one of the biggest challenges he has ever faced.

"It's a play that is very much about science," he said. "It deals with the relationship between two famous physicists, Heisenberg and Bohr, friends who have ended up on different sides in the Second World War.

"It tells of the dilemmas scientists face and uses concepts in nuclear physics such as uncertainty - it's very much centred around Heisenberg's famous Uncertainty Principle - as metaphors for human relationships.

"When I came into it I had virtually no knowledge of physics and it has been very difficult to learn because there's so much science. It's really fired my interest in the subject. I never realised science was so close to philosophy in so many ways."

Tickets for Copenhagen are available on 01684 892277.