‘Lettice’ Was Designed to Be Served <i> Sans </i> Dressing : Theater: Peter Shaffer says the dialogue of his comedy, opening this week at SCR, is meant to make audiences “see with their ears.”

Like Lettice Douffet in his 1987 comedy “Lettice & Lovage,” Peter Shaffer never seems at a loss for words. But in a recent interview he worried about sounding glib, something that wouldn’t bother her in the least.

“I discover what I mean as I write,” the eminent British playwright said by phone from New York, where he lives half the year. “That can be both terrifically exciting and very dangerous, because when you look at your words later you wonder, ‘Did I really mean that, or am I just making verbal patterns?’ ”

Playgoers will have a chance to make up their own minds when a revival of “Lettice & Lovage” opens Friday at South Coast Repertory.

Measured by his three best-known plays--”Amadeus,” “Equus” and “The Royal Hunt of the Sun”--Shaffer needn’t concern himself too much. Though some critics claim he fits high-flown ideas to middlebrow taste and therefore lacks profundity, a legion of admirers point to his rare talent for turning serious subjects to account on the commercial stage.

“Royal Hunt” (1964) abandoned conventional naturalism for an epic style to evoke the 16th-Century subjugation of the Incas by Francisco Pizarro, the death-obsessed conqueror seeking immortality.

“Equus” (1973) explored the intersection of religion, mythology and psychiatry through its ritualistic dramatization of a youth’s aberrant sexual awakening.

“Amadeus” (1979) dealt with the relationship between man and deity--a frequent theme for Shaffer--in its tale of the 17th-Century composer Antonio Salieri, whose fame cannot compensate for the bitter recognition that God prefers the music of his rival, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

But nowhere in his work is Shaffer’s consummate theatricality and passion for language more evident than in the title role of “Lettice & Lovage,” a character originally written for the British actress Maggie Smith.

Lettice is a middle-aged tour guide at a stately mansion with a history so uneventful that her canned lectures are putting listeners to sleep. Bored to tears herself, she begins to embroider the dull facts and soon is regaling tour groups with fantastic tales made of whole cloth.

This brings her into conflict with Lotte Shoen of the Preservation Trust, which runs the place. Lotte is shocked by Lettice’s flights of fancy, of course, and she calls Lettice on the carpet--not unlike the historical preservationists who accused Shaffer of taking creative liberties in both “Amadeus” and “The Royal Hunt of the Sun.”

Lettice refuses to back down. She explains that “fantasy floods in where fact leaves a vacuum.” She has adopted the credo of her late mother, a dauntless Shakespearean actress: “Language alone frees one. History gives one place.” Lettice’s motto, which could just as well be the playwright’s, is: “Enlarge! Enliven! Enlighten!”

As though to underscore the point, Shaffer has made the play a delicious debate, among other things, between fabulist and factualist. And he has dressed it to the nines in comic charm. Both characters have reams of wonderfully literate dialogue, with the emotional Lettice given to compulsive Wildean bursts of wit and the intellectual Lotte to cooler Shavian eruptions.

“I think most of the plays we see today are verbally undernourished,” said Shaffer, a two-time Tony Award winner (for “Equus” and “Amadeus”). “It’s not the amount of words they use. It’s a different sort of malnutrition: They do not stimulate the communal imagination of the audience. Our function as playwrights to some extent is to make audiences see with their ears, because films make us see with our eyes much better.”

Shaffer wrote “Lettice & Lovage” for Smith, a longtime friend, after she complained to him about a dearth of leading roles for middle-aged actresses in the British theater. She had appeared in three of his early one-act comedies--”The Private Ear” and “The Public Eye” (1962) and “Black Comedy” (1965)--but hadn’t had a role in any plays of his since.

“I have the impression we were in a taxi, but we may have been at dinner,” recalled Shaffer, who turns 68 next month and is this year’s Oxford University visiting professor of contemporary drama, an endowed chair whose previous occupants include Stephen Sondheim and Alan Ayckbourn.

“She said to me, ‘What are you doing now? Are you writing one of those plays you write for men?’ And I said, ‘What do you mean?’

“She said, ‘Oh, you know what I mean! All of my contemporaries who are men are now starting on their Falstaffs, their Lears, their Macbeths. What is there for me? I’ve done Viola. I’ve done Rosalind. There’s nothing left for me but freaks, the Lady Bracknells, that sort of thing.’

“I must have whined a bit or done something of the kind. But on the way home I thought, ‘My God, she’s right.’ American actresses have Tennessee (Williams), who wrote glorious parts for women. Who do we have?”

Shaffer didn’t just write “Lettice & Lovage” to give an old friend a role. He wanted to vent his feelings about England’s declining cultural heritage, particularly his anger at the architectural rape of London by developers and timid political conformists.

“Every time I went back to London, it was more ugly year by year,” he explained. “A lot was destroyed by the German bombs, but a great deal more has been destroyed since then by the British themselves.”

The issue, taken up most famously by Prince Charles, became the nation’s cause celebre.

The original British production of “Lettice & Lovage” premiered in Bath and transferred to the Globe Theatre in London’s West End, where Smith starred in it for a year opposite Margaret Tyzack’s Lotte. A smash hit, the production won the 1987 Evening Standard Drama Award for Best Comedy and ran for two years.

When the show opened on Broadway in 1990, it again starred Smith and Tyzack. Both won Tonys for their performances. Shaffer, who had revised the script slightly to make the ending more plausible, received a Tony nomination for best play.

Because he intended Lettice for the inimitable “sound of (Smith’s) voice and for her ability to phrase and to time,” Shaffer said, other performers with less flair may be intimidated by the role.

So his advice is simple: “Go with the language, with the flow of it. The rhetoric is the key to the character. It’s the verbal music of the piece. If it’s naturalistic and broken up or very ‘you know-ish,’ I don’t think it will work.”

For Kandis Chappell, who is playing Lettice in the SCR Mainstage production, size and brio represent two crucial aspects of the character that she is still trying to fathom. What she wants to avoid, she says, is playing larger than life in a comically grand dame way reminiscent of Judith Bliss, a role she portrayed at SCR last season in Noel Coward’s “Hay Fever.”

“Someone once said to me that the definition of panache is when too much is just enough,” Chappell noted in an interview last week. “Well, that’s Lettice.”

But she doesn’t believe her approach to the role will be anything like Smith’s.

“Maggie Smith is a very eccentric actress and I’m eccentric too, but in a totally different way. She is mannered. She can take things past the limit and still make it believable. That’s not my instinct at all. I can do broad, if that’s what is called for. But my instinct is to work very small.”

Nevertheless, Chappell’s results tend to be large. She is the only actress to have won three Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Awards in the 25-year history of the prizes--all for her performances in leading roles at SCR (in “The Crucible,” “Woman in Mind” and “Shadowlands”).

“The thing David really wants,” she said, referring to director David Emmes, “is the idea that when Lettice is insecure she covers it with absolute bravado. The only way you know she’s insecure is that her bravado is a little more than she needs it to be.”

Meanwhile, Megan Cole faces a different proposition as Lotte, who masks her vulnerability by putting on a stern countenance.

“Both of these women are out there in a high wind,” said Cole, who won an LADCC award (for “The Playboy of the Western World” at SCR). “This play is the story of how each of them copes, and they both cope by hiding.

“Lettice uses bravado. Lotte adopts an authoritarian veneer, which is all it is. She’s actually a woman of tremendous passion, and that’s not my overlay. It’s in the script.”

If Cole’s description makes Lettice and Lotte sound more dramatic than comic, she hasn’t done them an injustice. The play does have a certain heft even in its giddiest moments, not unlike its author.

Said Shaffer: “I combined my fury at the condition of London and my wish to write a comedic fantasy for Maggie. One absorbed the other.”

* “Lettice & Lovage” continues in previews Tuesday through Thursday and opens Friday at South Coast Repertory, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Previews: $14 to $25. Regular run: $25 to $35. Show times: 8 p.m. Ends May 15.