The Producers in the West End, an Olivier award and now Beckett: it's been a roller-coaster ride for Conleth Hill since Stones in his Pockets, writes Jane Coyle

For more than a year, Conleth Hill was unarguably the man with the best wardrobe in the West End. Just a few months later, he is on the point of turning into the worst-dressed man in Ireland, complete with unkempt, greying locks and tangled beard.

As Roger de Bris, the silky-smooth cross-dressing director in Mel Brooks's hit musical The Producers, Hill slithered his way into and out of a succession of outrageously slinky gowns - the first a spangled version of New York's Chrysler Building - before morphing with unsettling ease into the khakis and jackboots of a singing Adolf Hitler. His virtuoso performance was all the talk among audiences who poured out of the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, night after night.

Now the actor from Ballycastle, Co Antrim is back in the place he loves most, embarking on yet another chameleon-like transformation, as he prepares to play the role of Hamm in Prime Cut's Beckett centenary production of Endgame. He looks bemused that there should be any element of surprise at his willingness to return to Belfast, after the limelight of the West End and Broadway.

"I will always come home, until I move away," he says, cryptically. "I may have been working away, but I have never left. I didn't hesitate when Prime Cut offered me this monumental role. I have a continuity with the company. I've done three shows for them and have always liked their approach to new and interesting work. I had intended coming out of The Producers in September and doing nothing before this.

"But then Owen McCafferty and Jimmy Nesbitt asked me to do Shoot the Crow in London. Jimmy and I have been mates since we were kids; we were in Ulster Youth Theatre together. And I have a lot of admiration for Owen's writing, so I said I would do it for a limited run. It was a great experience - we got brilliant reviews and an Olivier nomination for Best New Comedy. But I've still to get my little rest."

HILL'S CAREER took off on an upward trajectory after his multi-award winning appearance in Marie Jones's Stones in His Pockets, which toured Ireland and the UK before taking the West End and Broadway by storm. But, for all the plaudits, the Broadway run was marred for him by two tragedies - the events of 9/11 and the terminal illness of his father.

"I guess you could say Stones was the watershed in my career. Certainly a lot of people knew who I was after seeing me in it. But they were bad times on Broadway. I would rather not have been there in the circumstances and it was a case of getting the job done as best I could."

Among the people who had been at Stones in his Pockets and spotted Hill's remarkable capacity for switching roles and identities were Michael Frayn and Michael Blakemore, respectively the writer and director of the play Democracy, which had been commissioned by the National Theatre in London. When Hill was sent the script and asked to consider the role of Gunther Guillaume, the Stasi spy who worked for German Chancellor Willy Brandt, he didn't hesitate.

"I wanted it more than anything I had ever read," he recalls. "I met them on a Friday and they offered it to me on the Monday. It was amazing what I learned from working alongside Roger Allam [who played Brandt], being directed by someone as brilliant as Blakemore and saying Michael Frayn's effortlessly dazzling lines. It was the human side of Democracy that appealed to me. Here was a character who worked slavishly for Brandt for years and yet betrayed him to the East. It was a study in the duplicity of human nature, a man who could be right in Brandt's face one minute and then melt away into servile anonymity the next. The challenge was in being at the centre of a scene and then disappearing - while remaining in the same room."

Democracy transferred from the National to a hugely successful run at Wyndham's Theatre, giving Hill a taste of the gruelling schedule that is a fact of life in the West End.

"The National is my favourite place of work. You are doing great plays in London with wonderful people but you are in rep, so you have time off between performances and the opportunity to get home. Once you are in the West End, you have to be so disciplined and energetic to do more than eight shows a week and keep it fresh. Sunday is your only day off and all you want to do is rest up."

And so it was to be with The Producers, one of the biggest and most demanding shows in London and described by Hill as "a labour of love".

"I had been a big fan of Mel Brooks since I was a teenager. It was hard to imagine myself watching movies like Young Frankenstein and Blazing Saddles all those years ago and now actually working with him. It was really cool. He and Susan Stroman had seen me in Stones on Broadway and came looking for me. For a few weeks, I was doing eight performances of Democracy and rehearsing The Producers during the day. The role of De Bris kind of sneaks up on you and I must admit I found some of the Hitler stuff quite shocking. I had to do a lot of eyeballing of the audience and that was hard. Stroman used to tell me that I looked like I wasn't enjoying myself, but that's not the way I work, it's not the way we're brought up here. You're constantly told not to show off and now I was being asked to show off shamelessly and play to the crowd. It took a while to get it."

Now a challenge of a different kind is in prospect: playing the disabled Hamm, the pivotal member of what director Mark Lambert describes as an "appalling dysfunctional family". It will be Hill's second tilt at Beckett, having played one of the tramps in Waiting for Godot, alongside his old Stones sparring partner Sean Campion.

"This is funnier, darker, less repetitious," he says. "It's four people in a room, waiting for death. It's Big Brother on the stage, car-crash theatre. I saw Michael Gambon and Lee Evans do it in London and found it hilarious. The more we laughed, the more dirty looks we got.

"It's brilliant to be working with a fantastic actor like Frankie McCafferty as the servant Clov and with Sir Ian [ McElhinney] and Dame Stella [ McCusker] as the legless parents. And Mark, too, who directed me in Juno and the Paycock in Edinburgh and has such a good eye and ear for what is believable. There's been a tendency in the past to be over-deferential and po-faced about Beckett, but with the advent of surreal comedy like Father Ted, there is less need to explain or apologise. As Frankie says, 'it's all lettin' on, isn't it?' "

WHILE THE public perception is that in 2006 all things Beckettian will revolve around the Gate Theatre in Dublin and the Barbican in London, it is something of a coup for Prime Cut to have secured the performance rights to Endgame, as well as to Beckett's radio play All That Fall, which will have a reading and public discussion at the Waterfront Hall Studio on the afternoon of February 11th.

The company's creative producer, Emma Jordan, says that given the writer's Northern connections, it seemed natural that a Belfast company should make an approach to the Beckett Estate.

"We found them very cooperative and sympathetic," she says. "Our approach was based on our artistic credibility and on the creative team that we could bring to the table. Prime Cut has an outstanding track record, built up over 14 years, of bringing to Ireland challenging international work by writers such as Ariel Dorfman, Trevor Griffiths and Timberlake Westenbaker. Both plays will be spoken in the Northern Ireland idiom, which will set the productions apart a little bit."

While he slowly sinks deeper beneath the skin of the monstrous Hamm, awards and critical praise are very far from Conleth Hill's thoughts. But the successes of the past few years have left their mark on his appealingly downbeat persona, giving him a palpable sense of his own worth as an actor.

His past four shows have been nominated for Olivier awards and his performance in The Producers secured his second individual Olivier for Best Supporting Actor in a Musical - up against Michael Crawford in The Woman in White and David Hague in Mary Poppins.

"Michael Crawford sent me a message of congratulation next day, which was nice," he says. "Second time around, it can't be just flukey. I must be doing something right."

Endgame opens at the Belfast Waterfront Hall tomorrow