Most people know Anthony Shaffer's Sleuth from the 1972 film starring Laurence Olivier and Michael Caine.

The latest pair stepping into their shoes as the famous mystery writer and his wife's lover embroiled in a psychological duel of game-play and deception are Simon McCorkindale and Michael Praed.

Not that they see it like that. As one of a long line of Robin Hoods on screen, Praed knows that you can make your mark in a role and that this Milo Tindle is his own.

"I have been asked a few times if I was offput by following in someone's footsteps and it's a ridiculous question. I am sure they didn't ask Ian McKellen that when he was playing Richard III," he says.

"I am a different person from Michael Caine and whatever I do as Milo is going to be radically different."

Praed was familiar with the original movie which he admired but never got round to watching the remake prior to going into rehearsals.

However, he seems to know all about it when responding to the suggestion that the character of the older man, Andrew Wyke, in particular seemed a little anachronistic and there might have been the need to make changes for modern audiences.

"The Michael Caine-Jude Law incarnation of Sleuth bears only a resemblance to the play with all that homoerotic stuff. It is different on so many different levels, though the premise is the same," he asserts.

"One of the points Shaffer was making was that Andrew Wyke is typical of the country house world in being racist and misogynist.

"He is a late middle-aged man with a sexual problem. There's nothing strange about him, he's just a man who is obsessed with game-playing.

"We haven't updated it to the present day because you then lead yourself open to questions like: 'Why doesn't he just get on his mobile phone?' So we have kept it to when it was written, the beginning of the Seventies."

He also challenges the perception of Sleuth as a clever theatrical device rather than a piece of quality drama that will stand the test of time .

"People think it is a 'theatrical' piece for all the wrong reasons. They take no regard of when it was written because Shaffer arrived at the same time as people like Pinter when there was a big shift away from the of things always having a beginning, a middle and an end and an overt worldliness.

"Our jobs as actors is to tell a story as truthfully as possible and if the words brilliantly shine it makes our job easier. This is fiendishly clever and constantly well-written play," says the actor.

His previous stage co-stars include Susannah York (September Tide) and Rachel Weisz (Design for Living) and previously toured the Lyceum in Copacabana: The Musical.

Touring holds no fears for the actor who says he has always enjoyed seeing new places, perhaps as a legacy of a childhood in a foreign land.

In the Sixties he lived in Iran, where his father worked in the oil industry, until coming to boarding school in Britain.

He is still best known from TV as Robin of Sherwood back in the Eighties, followed by his stint in US soap Dynasty as Prince Michael of Moldavia and more recently was the regular narrator of history series Timewatch.

Sleuth is at the Lyceum from Monday to Saturday.