THEATER : Much Ado, Indeed : Adrian Noble’s vision for the Royal Shakespeare Company takes it from London to the hinterlands and far beyond (even your local cinema).

In a strange land, it’s best to play along.

That’s exactly what Adrian Noble, artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, did recently, what with his proper English manners and his years of training as an actor. He was attending a reopening celebration of the Geary Theater, the earthquake-damaged home of the American Conservatory Theater.

Problem was, he hadn’t a clue what, exactly, was going on.

“I sang ‘The Star-Spangled Banner.’ I mouthed all the words half a sentence behind everyone else,” Noble says. “Annette Bening, I knew,” he continues. “I had supper with her beforehand. But she was the only person. They’d say, ‘And good old Edward Sniggs.’ I’d think, ‘What are they talking about?’ ” (“Sniggs,” actually, was former ACT artistic director Edward Hastings.)

Not to worry. Noble carried on.

“I think it would have been a bit rude to leave,” he says the morning after and then adds, ever so diplomatically, “It was rather nice.”

Noble and his acclaimed band of thespians landed here earlier this month to kick off a four-city United States tour of the RSC’s latest production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” The play, directed by Noble, runs through Saturday in San Francisco before moving on to Chicago, Washington, D.C., and then, in March, Broadway. Recast, it will tour Australia and the Far East (“the other half of the world,” Noble says) for six months starting next fall, and a $40-million variation on the production will come to the big screen sometime later this year.

As it did in England, Noble’s “Midsummer” is playing to mostly positive reviews. The San Francisco Chronicle’s critic Steven Winn called the production “a glorious celebration of spoken verse done up in rainbow brilliance.” San Francisco Examiner reviewer Robert Hurwitt wrote: “Noble’s vision of Shakespeare keeps veering from moments of stunning beauty and brilliant characterizations to something that seems to aspire to be a ‘Cirque du Night’s Dream.’ ”

The brightly colored set--bulbs dangle midair like giant fireflies, doors appear out of nowhere and a big, red floating umbrella becomes a bower--is like a surrealist painting. (Lighting designer Chris Parry, who won a Tony Award for his work on “The Who’s Tommy,” is responsible for much of that effect.) The cast, not surprisingly, speaks Shakespeare’s language with a seamless confidence not always heard on the American stage.

The impetus for the tour came from San Francisco producer Carole Shorenstein Hays, who saw the play in 1994 in Stratford-on-Avon, the company’s headquarters, before it moved on to its London home at the Barbican Centre. Her plan to bring the RSC production to the U.S. raised some eyebrows: “Everyone said, ‘Who’s the star? Who’s in it?’ ” she says. “ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘Shakespeare.’ ”

Noble was enthusiastic about the idea. Although RSC has toured the United States with some frequency--its last stop in the Los Angeles area was in 1994 with “Richard IV” at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts--upping RSC’s U.S. presence is clearly on his agenda. The March run of “Midsummer” on Broadway, for example, will mark the troupe’s first New York City run in 10 years.

“I hope we’ll be here every year,” Noble says energetically. “That’s our avowed aim. If not every year, every other year. I would love to go to Los Angeles very much. We were passionate to go. But we couldn’t find the right theater. I love the new Ahmanson. It’s excellent. I wanted to go there.”

The royals, for sure, would be welcomed back to San Francisco. Whatever their antics onstage as Bottom, Puck, Lysander, Titania and Oberon, offstage they are, like their leader, ever so gracious.

“They wanted to know where the teapots were,” says Tony Reilly, general manager of the Shorenstein Hays Nederlander Organization, which is helping to produce the U.S. tour. And they asked permission to “cheer up” the dreary dressing rooms at the Golden Gate Theatre.

“It’s been a midwinter’s dream,” Reilly says. “The whole company is so pleasant, understanding, tasteful--all the things you aren’t used to in the theater. I’ve never met a group of people who have so little ego yet with so much reason to have one.”

Over a plate of eggs, sausage and potatoes, Noble, 45, displays a mildly sagacious air. His hair is a bit scruffy this morning, and he’s wearing a tweed jacket over a T-shirt. “I’m going to tuck in, if that’s all right, add to my cholesterol level,” he says, waving his arms around, mid-munch. “I’ve given up thinking about that when I’m over here. It’s impossible to eat in the United States, I think. Everything you eat is bad for you.”

Noble first joined the RSC in 1980, as a director. Eleven years later, he was appointed artistic director of the company, whose alumni include Laurence Olivier, Kenneth Branagh, Emma Thompson, Patrick Stewart and Daniel Day-Lewis.

“I inherited the company when it was in difficult times,” he says. “We had a $5-million deficit, which is a bit of a bore. We were concentrating so much on survival. We weren’t touring so much. I reestablished it with classical principles. We aim to be the best classical theater company in the world.”

Noble may be an artist, but he can also be as practical as an accountant, says RSC actor Desmond Barrit, who plays Nick Bottom in Noble’s “Midsummer.” (Like the rest of the 19-member cast, he was in the original production and will also appear in the film.)

“I can’t say he’s a financial wizard,” Barrit says of his boss, “but he has people around him. They get together and work out the best way to do justice to a play and make money. He doesn’t work in isolation.”

The 700-member company, with 200 actors, plays to more than a million people every year in Britain and receives generous government support. It has an annual budget of about $40 million and a 20-month, 22-play “season.” The RSC operates five theaters--three in Stratford and two in London, including the one at the Barbican Centre. In addition to Noble’s ambitious international tour plans, beginning in 1997 he is pulling the London company out of the Barbican Centre for six months a year to hit the road in the United Kingdom. His passion to tour “the regions” during summer months created immediate controversy. After all, Britain’s “cultural flagship,” as The Independent calls it, has had a full-time contingent in London for 36 years.

“The London critics have been appalled,” Noble says. “And everybody who doesn’t live in London is thrilled. I don’t believe any arts organization can be all things to all men. You have to make priorities. The idea of one center where everything happens is an anathema to me. Everybody around the country pays their taxes for it. I think you should have a reasonable chance of having a look at it every now and then.

“We would much rather go into the millennium with a broader base around the United Kingdom and, indeed, abroad. That’s very important.”

Noble himself is no Londoner. He lives in a cottage outside Stratford, and he grew up in Chichester, on the south coast of England, where Olivier’s National Theatre performed summer plays. Noble could visit his local playhouse and see great actors like Sir Larry, Maggie Smith and Alec Guinness. The National Theatre may have pointed him in the direction of the actor’s life, but it was the RSC that was his goal. It was Peter Brook’s late 1960s, early 1970s production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” in fact, that drew him in.

“When I was at university, I used to hitchhike up to Stratford,” Noble says. “We used to sleep out in the fields in sleeping bags. I used to stand at the back of the stalls and watch all these productions. I thought they were fantastic.

“I loved the idea of the Royal Shakespeare Company. People come together for [a] nearly two-year [season] to work, create plays together, play in repertoire. We spend a lot of time in Stratford, working on voice projection, craft, all of those things. We encourage a real sense of company.”

A swing used in Noble’s own “Midsummer” is a reminder of the acrobatic Brook production, which toured the United States about 25 years ago.

“It’s a nod of respect to Peter,” he says.

Noble’s production, which played for 15 months to sold-out houses in England, employs a stripped-down, three-walled box set awash in layers of colored light and moody, ethereal music.

“We wanted very simple, visual references: an umbrella, a light bulb and a door,” Noble says. “We build up a visual language that is both contemporary and also surreal, fantastical, exotic, strange, mysterious. It makes you look at the world in a slightly different way.”

Despite the play’s status as one of the Bard’s most popular comedies, Noble’s version emphasizes the dark aspects of the tale, honing in on the complexity of human emotions once the characters flee Athens for the fourth-dimension-like forest.

“What [Shakespeare] does is investigate what happens when the veneer of civilization drops,” he says. “It’s quite violent, actually. [Demetrius and Lysander] say, ‘I want this woman more than anything.’ They are going to fight each other like beasts. It says there are forces in the human mind that are really powerful that we have to understand.

“The other dark subject is sex. Shakespeare picks up [Oberon and Titania’s] story at that cusp when a marriage is breaking down. What they argue about in their first speeches are love affairs. It becomes the trigger point for the mother of all rows. People punch each other about sex. . . .

“He knows that underneath this surface of civilization people are desperate. ‘The lunatic, the lover, and the poet, are of imagination all compact.’ In many ways, that’s the key speech of the play.”

Noble’s surreal and dark-toned version of the play may not exactly be a traditional fairy-story staging of “Midsummer,” but it doesn’t trespass the text. The same can’t be said of RSC’s movie version.

The movie, which represents Noble’s first experiences as a film director, may be ready for an early summer festival showing but, he says, the fall is more likely. The cast began work on the film at the Bray Studios, outside London, shortly after the Barbican production closed Nov. 2, but the project is not merely a filmed version of that production. Instead, Noble says, the movie is more grounded in reality. It begins as a child’s dream and contains allusions to “Alice in Wonderland” and “E.T.”

Translating a wordy Elizabethan play penned around 1594 into a motion picture script was no easy act. It meant leaving words of the world’s greatest playwright on the cutting-room floor. “I did about four drafts of the script,” Noble says. “On each occasion I became more bold. Initially, one clings onto things from the theater. Then one starts throwing them out.

“The average length of sentences in movies is four or five words. Oberon sits down and he says 200 words. Then somebody says 40 words back. That’s a big challenge. Do I leave the camera there? Do I cut all the words out? We have to make people listen as well as watch without them thinking, ‘Don’t lay all this culture on me.’ It has to be popular. No saying, ‘Oh, it would have been nice if you had read the play before you came.’ ”

Enough text was chopped that the playwright himself would weep if alive today, the RSC’s Barrit says. “You’d say the first line. Then skip to the fourth line. Sometimes a half a page was cut. I remember a couple of times slipping lines back in. [Noble] would notice it, but I got away with it.”

Noble, who had rebuffed requests to film past RSC productions, believed “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” was the perfect vehicle to leap from the stage to the silver screen. He acknowledges that the U.S. movie industry casts “a long shadow” even in Britain, which has always nurtured strong, indigenous regional theater. The RSC, for example, routinely loses its big guns, such as Branagh, to the silver screen. Indeed, it is increasingly difficult to get actors to commit to the long contract periods customary at the company.

“Ben Kingsley spent 11 years with the Royal Shakespeare Company,” Noble points out. “He did the odd television part. But he was there at least 10 months of the year. Nowadays, the idea of a young, very talented actor spending years with the Royal Shakespeare Company is unthinkable. They couldn’t dream of it. They do maybe two, maybe four years at the most, and then they’ve got to move on and make movies and get going. So the world’s changed. It’s a problem for theater companies like the RSC.”

The pressure to find new talent intensifies. “We always have to do that,” Noble says. “And we’re pretty good at it--Branagh, Ralph Fiennes, other people you haven’t heard of yet. These are people we have to find young and nurture.”

Noble has long since put down his knife and fork, and his breakfast plate has been cleared. While he talks, he finishes one more cup of coffee. His “sadly brief” one-week visit to San Francisco is coming to an end, he says, and though he has been unhurried in conversation, he makes it clear that he really must join his wife, actress Joanne Pearce, and 2-year-old daughter, Rose, to prepare for an afternoon flight back to London. (The family always travels together. Rose went with the company to Tokyo when she was just 4 weeks old.)

Back in England, there’s editing still to be done on the movie, planning for future productions, as well as keeping an eye on his successful London production of Anton Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard,” which he directed and says he might also take on tour abroad. He will, he says, be returning to the United States for the openings of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” in Chicago, Washington and New York.

“Now,” he says, “I’m going to have to go.” And then those English manners kick in again: “Is that all right?” he asks rhetorically.

Who could possibly ask one more question?

Noble pushes back his chair and exits, smiling politely.

*

“A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Golden Gate Theatre, 25 Taylor St., San Francisco, Tues.-Sat., 8 p.m., Wed. and Sat., 2 p.m. $25-$55. (415) 776-1999.