TV star Jane Asher is set to star in A Song At Twilight at Theatre Royal Windsor this month.

She will be joined by Simon Callow, an acclaimed actor, writer and director best known for films like Amadeus, Four Weddings and Funeral, A Room With A View and Shakespeare in Love.

A Song At Twilight, by Noël Coward, tells the story of world-famous author Sir Hugo Latymer who is growing old, rude and haughty.

In the private suite of a lakeside hotel where he lives, he is attended to by his long-suffering wife and former secretary, Hilde, and Felix, a handsome young waiter.

Here he nervously awaits the arrival of an old flame, actress Carlotta Gray, with whom he enjoyed a two-year love affair more than forty years ago.

Mr Callow, who stars as Sir Hugo, speaks about the play and his character.

How would you sum up the character of Sir Hugo?

Hugo Latymer is a very famous writer, one of the most famous writers in the world. He’s a knight of the realm, which in 1966 was a little less usual than it is now. In other words, he must be pretty outstanding to have gotten a knighthood.

He’s 70 or thereabouts and he’s spent his life going around the world to various watering holes. At the moment of the play he’s in Switzerland in a grand suite that he takes for three months every year, then he goes to Arizona to rest and recuperate, meanwhile steadily maintaining an output of novels and short stories.

He’s about as famous as a writer can be. Think Earnest Hemingway or John Galsworthy. Think Somerset Maugham, in fact, who was in some sense the model for this character. He’s married to a woman who was his secretary. They’ve been married for 20 years, then his former mistress [Carlotta Gray, played by Jane Asher] suddenly reappears in his life.

Can you relate to him?
There are not a lot of points of connection between me and Hugo. I’ve known people like him and I know people like him, but I’m not such a person - which is one of the great joys of acting, you know: the chance to get inside another man’s skin. 

I suppose if I’d written a couple of novels which were hugely successful very early in my life and therefore never have wanted for anything financially or in any other way, I can see how one might become such a man - to some extent isolated from the world and isolated from his own emotions.

Does the play present any challenges to you as an actor?
All plays written by Noël Coward are fiercely demanding mentally. You have to be so alert for them and you can’t let up for one second. 

Coward said of himself ‘My plays need vitality and I myself have the vitality of the devil’. You need that for the unending flow of very sharp language.

It’s quite remarkable and it’s very different, for example, from playing Shakespeare where there’s a huge warmth generally in the language and a great emotional richness. 
Here it’s people who are, sometimes to comic effect and in this play to rather more dramatic effect, at war with each other.

Sometimes it’s a war of wit, sometimes it’s a war for survival, and our play falls a little more into the latter category.

What do you feel makes Noël Coward such a revered writer?
He was very, very clever. He knew his craft extraordinarily well, he knew what was effective for an audience and I think almost unbeknownst to himself he goes into and explores emotional territory which is quite special to him.

A lot of his characters, if you examine the plays a little more carefully, appear to be about to have nervous breakdowns. There’s a tremendous hyper-activity within them and they seem to be heading for a fall. 

It’s fascinating how quickly, for example, any relationship turns into a skirmish and a battle. There’s very little in Noël Coward of people just loving each other and having a delightful time together. There’s tension, anxiety, malice and competitiveness. 

I suppose it’s very characteristic of the world in which he came into his maturity, the world of the 20s, and that basic rhythm and pulse of the 20s, of the Bright Young Things and all of that, is very much there in all his plays.

Visit www.theatreroyalwindsor.co.uk for tickets.