Charles Dance is feeling a mite vulnerable -- understandably so when you consider the challenge he has undertaken on his return to the Royal Shakespeare Company after 10 years of working largely with cameras. As a part, Coriolanus is no sinecure.

But when you consider what has happened to him since he last appeared with the RSC in this very play, it is possible to forgive him a certain tetchiness. After all, as we talk backstage at Stratford he has just opened to mixed notices in a role which demands more than a touch of arrogance.

It was in Alan Howard's Coriolanus in 1979-80 that Charles took over from Julian Glover as Tullus Aufidius after first playing the Volscian lieutenant. But the decade between has given him star status and the additional responsibility which that entails.

That decade provided the initial platform to stardom which came his way when he was cast as Guy Perron in The Jewel in the Crown -- and a string of important television roles followed. Recently, we have seen the repeat of the challenging series, First Born, and since then he has made an American television film of The Phantom of the Opera.

But it was the transition to movies which really raised Charles Dance's status -- playing opposite Meryl Streep in Plenty and alongside Joss Ackland in White Mischief among others.

So how has all this changed him?

"Well, I've got a bit more money in the bank and yes, there's a certain amount of pressure. Pressure is an odd thing. It makes you behave in an odd way. Depending on what sort of mood you're in, what sort of shape you're in, physically and emotionally, you either rise to that pressure or succumb to it."

This is all said with the benefit of hindsight -- from the perspective of someone who has travelled his own personal road to Damascus.

For he now admits that some of the remarks he made to the press after working with Miss Streep were injudicious. Today, he says, he would be less honest -- though I can detect nothing but candour in his revised version of the episode.

"We didn't get on too well," he says. "I think she's wonderful, I think she's probably the finest screen actress of her generation. But I -- because of my natural actor's paranoia -- thought because we didn't speak very much that she didn't like me or that I had bad breath or something."

But he now has an inkling of the sort of pressure under which people like Meryl Streep work, and he is much more appreciative of what that actually means.

"Whatever she needs to do to cope with that pressure, to concentrate on her job and produce a believable character -- whichever method it is, she must choose it. And it's tough luck on everybody else. I sort of understand that now.

"I stupidly, at the time, did one or two interviews where I was asked: 'How did you get on with Meryl Streep?' It's the sort of dumb question which, with the greatest of respect, British journalists tend to ask. And I quite honestly said: 'Not very well.'

"I would be much more careful now and I would temper my honesty because I know what it is to have a certain amount of pressure. It's like a golfer. Without pressure he could probably sink a 15ft putt with no trouble at all. But with the crowd standing around and £150,000 sitting on his back...different!

"If anybody raises money on you to make a film there is the responsibility that you're presumed to be a bankable commodity. The pressure for me, coming into this -- and I hope you don't detect the smell of burning martyr: I'm just stating a fact -- is that I know there are a lot of people who want to see me go straight down the toilet.

"So I can't just prove it to myself, I have to live up to other people's expectations -- or disabuse people of their bloodlust, basically.

"If we've got a full house of 1,500 people I rather pessimistically assume that at least 500 of them are there with loaded catapults. That's something I wouldn't have thought about before."

Charles Dance, though, is a realist. He knows perfectly well that one of the reasons for his being asked back by the RSC to play Coriolanus is the success he has enjoyed outside the company.

"The way this thing is being marketed -- there's a picture of me on the programme, there's a picture of me on the poster -- means the expectation is that people will come to see it because I'm in it. Now, that's not conceit, it's a fact. That's why it's being marketed that way.

"They haven't got a picutre of the First Citizen on the front, or even Barbara Jefford, who is wonderful in it. It's me -- so the pressure is there, sitting on these shoulders.

"Sometimes I can puff up and take that. Another time I think: 'Oh, my God!' -- because I'm much more naturally an introvert than an extrovert -- which doesn't help, playing this part!"

He is finding some satisfaction, though, in returning to the stage.

"A lot of the time making films or doing things on television one's energy is taken up with improving the script -- with making a silk purse out of a pig's ear. And here, one has a silk purse to begin with, so one can devote all of one's energy to practising one's craft and developing what is hopefully a believable character."

We are meeting just before lunchtime and Mr. Dance's nerves seem a trifle raw. That morning he has read a new review of Coriolanus and it is not one that is calculated to massage his ego.

"It's largely my responsibility to drive the play," he says, "but I haven't worked in the theatre for seven years. The last time was at the Bush Theatre, which is a very intimate, small space.

"I've been working with cameras by and large since I was last with the RSC, so there are a lot of muscles that have lain dormant in me that need to be flexed now. We opened to the press after five or six previews -- not nearly enough, really. One is, unfortunately, judged on that.

"Some of the reviews are good, some are all right. one that I read this morning wasn't particularly good -- especially for me. Well, tough luck." He grimaces and bears it.

In fact, I have suggested several times during the course of our conversation that his decision to return to the RSC in such a high profile role, and after such a long break, displays a considerable degree of courage.

"It's courageous -- or bloody stupid," he says, "one thing or another, because the British attitude to success is to actually punch a hole in it."

And there he finds a definite parallel with Coriolanus, who suffers the same sort of bruising at the hands of the people.

"Here is this professional soldier, a warrior who really only lives for a bloody good fight. He believes in the status quo. He believes in the aristocracy and the working class -- not the middle class. He sees the middle class as either the working class on the make or the aristocracy feeling the pinch.

"He is a patrician, he is proud, he is arrogant -- these are the things for which he is hated by the people. He is alternatively loved by the people when he wins wars for them -- and is a great hero.

"Heroes become unpopular the minute they become heroes. When you wish someone to be a hero they are greatly popular. Once they become heroes they are resented and they are envied.

"This happens throughout history. It happens especially, for some reason, in this country. We have a very peculiar attitude to success."

He insists, thought, that this production of Coriolanus has huge merits and is full of praise not only for Miss Jefford, who plays Volimnia, but also for Malcolm Storry who is Tullus Aufidius.

"When it works it's a great flier, you know. We have a way to go yet, actually. But hopefully, by the time we get to Newcastle we'll be cooking with gas."

Obviously, nobody bothered to tell him the Newcastle season was being sponsored by Northern Electric!

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