Theater : Reason to Be in Good Cheer : Roger Rees, of ‘Nicholas Nickleby’ fame, loves to collaborate--just what you’d hope for in an actor-director tackling Shakespeare.

To countless theatergoers, he will always be the title character in “The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby,” the landmark 8 1/2-hour Royal Shakespeare Company production of the early 1980s that garnered its star Olivier and Tony awards for best actor, as well as an Emmy nomination.

Others know him as Robin Colcord on the TV series “Cheers,” or from his many feature films. Yet Roger Rees’ greatest role, as his 25 years with the RSC attest, may well be that of team player. A company man to the core, he knows well that theater is an inherently collaborative form. “Most of my enjoyable times in the theater have been working in a group,” says the charismatic and well-spoken 55-year-old actor-director, seated in a conference room at the Old Globe Theatre, where he’s directing “The Merry Wives of Windsor,” opening Saturday.

“You know, ‘Nicholas Nickleby’ was the best example, where 43 people could make an audience of 1,500 look at a fingernail at any given moment. It was so controlled, and yet it was a group of disparate individuals. It was a happy, constructive time, and it seemed to be an active discussion of what makes the theater work.”

He is contemplating the craft in part because he’s working on the other side of the footlights these days. Best known as an actor, he has been directing since the mid-1980s, when he served as co-artistic director of the Bristol Old Vic Theatre Company in England. He has staged works at Playwrights Horizons in New York and on several occasions at the Williamstown Theatre Festival in Massachusetts. Earlier this summer, Rees directed and co-starred, opposite Bebe Neuwirth, in “The Taming of the Shrew” at the highly regarded annual summer gathering.

“I actually believe that acting is a great path to directing, and with certain actors you get a sense of their ability to lead a company,” says Williamstown festival producer Michael Ritchie. “[Roger] has a wildly theatrical sensibility, and he’s able to translate that to a company, so ultimately what you get is a company that has a core belief in the play. He’s got great ideas and he’s able to express them really well, and that puts everybody on the same page. He does so much work in advance; he’s one of the most prepared directors I’ve ever met.”

Clearly, directing is no mere lark for Rees. “He’s in a very interesting transition,” says Globe artistic director Jack O’Brien. “My instinct about Roger is that he’s at a point in his life where stuff that was fed into him is now starting to come out. Here’s a guy who was virtually born in a company tradition. He’s been the poster boy for English theater companies since he was out of knee britches. He has great storytelling ability, profound technical expertise and a real glint in his eye.”

He also combines idealism with pragmatism. “What I strive to do is to make the theater experience something that people remember and recall rather than dismiss because it was less like their everyday experiences,” Rees says. “So, I’m less interested in internal emotionalism and much more in making the audience laugh and cry by the devices that we use as theater actors.”

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Rees, who lives in New York, has the chiseled features of a leading man and the insights of a savant. His conversation combines an actor’s passion with a scholar’s understanding of the text, and there’s an undercurrent of humility that runs throughout. Indeed, he sometimes sounds less like a well-known artist than a university instructor--a position he has occasionally held at Florida State University, UCLA and Columbia University.

“ ‘Merry Wives of Windsor’ is a wonderful machine,” Rees says. “It’s one of the great farces, and it’s astonishing to remember that this is written by the same man who wrote ‘Hamlet,’ ‘The Taming of the Shrew’ or ‘Cymbeline.’ It’s so similar and yet the form is so different. ‘Merry Wives of Windsor’ will be very funny, very jolly, but there’s also a wonderful poignancy to it. What’s fantastic about it is the nature of forgiveness in it, which is, of course, absolutely similar to every great play Shakespeare wrote, like ‘Pericles,’ ‘Winter’s Tale’ and ‘Cymbeline.’ ”

For Rees, it’s a more complicated play than the common understanding might suggest. “I like the redeemable quality in it, the fact that what you think is just going to be a knockabout farce actually turns out to be something educative and helpful to us all in life,” he says. “At the end of the play, Mistress Page says, let’s all go off and sit around a country fire and tell how we got to this state, how we got to this place of peace and happiness.”

The chief vehicle for the lesson is the character of Sir John Falstaff, played here by veteran classical actor and Globe associate artist Dakin Matthews. The would-be libertine sets out to seduce the married mistresses Page and Ford but ends up being foiled by the wiles of the women and their husbands. “What’s delightful about it is this sense of affection in the play,” Rees says. “Falstaff is not successful. Falstaff is, yes, lecherous, yes, menacing. However, more than that, he’s a windbag, he sees his own frailty, he pushes himself beyond his own endurance. The frailty in every character is built in.”

For this production, Rees has set the action in present-day Canada. “It’s about shopkeepers, and that’s why it works well in a city environment like Windsor, Ontario.

“If you think of Sir John Falstaff as somebody coming from England whose only claim to fame is that he’s a lord, the ordinary people of Canada--this is what happens in the play anyway, I’ve not changed anything--just beat out this lecherous lord, and he learns the error of his ways. Canada is one of the last parts of the Commonwealth, which Britain used to own. So, you have this lord who’s resting on those laurels coming to this place who gets taught a lesson by the people of Canada. What happens is that somebody who’s got too high-minded a view of himself gets brought down a peg or two. And I like the fact that there’s a sort of colonial trick to it as well.”

It may sound like a conceit to transport the action to a setting so far from Elizabethan England, but not according to Rees. “Sometimes people will say, ‘Well, why not just do it straight?’ But what does that mean--ruffs and collars and tights? Most of Shakespeare’s plays were done on bare boards in the middle of the afternoon and, for the most part, the actors wore their own clothes with a cloak or a crown or a wooden sword in their hand.

“They were much more abstract and experimental than we’re being. I think Shakespeare applauds people reexamining these plays and reinterpreting them for different generations,” he says. “My theory about Shakespeare is that, whatever you do to him, he wriggles free and is better than we are. No matter what, really no one comes near this incredible, extraordinary person.”

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Rees was born in Aberystwyth, Wales, and was raised in south London. He began his professional life as a visual artist, training as a painter at the Slade School of Fine Arts in London. In the early days, he worked as a scenic artist. Rees began acting in the mid-1960s, and by 1967 he had joined the RSC. During the 1970s, Rees appeared in countless RSC stagings, growing into larger roles. Then, in 1980, he starred in “Nicholas Nickleby,” a show that would change not only his career but the way European-American theater thought about adaptations of literary classics.

Based on the Charles Dickens novel of the same name, the show played to great success in London’s West End before transferring to Broadway the following year. It was there, in fact, that the Globe’s O’Brien first encountered Rees, although the actor was not aware of it at the time. “I met him for the very first time in the balcony of a theater in New York where ‘Nicholas Nickleby’ played, between the afternoon and evening sessions,” O’Brien says. “He was up in the audience talking to people. He had no idea who I was at the time. He was so filled with the genuine joy of performing, so unself-conscious that I was shocked at how available he made himself in the middle of a play.

“To put yourself in an audience’s midst, you either are really a warrior or a complete raving idiot,” O’Brien continues. “Most of us run for cover. But here was the star of the piece presenting himself not only with a modified pride, but for my benefit. [I thought] ‘This person is not just doing a job, this person is on a mission.’ ”

In 1983, Rees landed his first major film roles, including the portrayal of a character based loosely on Peter Bogdanovich in Bob Fosse’s “Star 80.” He has continued to work in film since then, in both comic and dramatic roles, in such features as Mel Brooks’ 1993 “Robin Hood: Men in Tights” and 1996’s “The Substance of Fire.”

Surprisingly, perhaps, for someone who is so closely associated with Shakespeare, Rees feels a particular affinity for comedy. “I was always much happier doing the funny stuff than the tragic,” he says. “I get leading-man parts and things like that. However, I think if I was 3 foot high, I would be world-famous right now, because I’m good at funny stuff. If I was 3 foot high, that’s the right height for my comedy.”

His comedic skills were put to use for his recurring role on the popular NBC TV series “Cheers.” Rees played Kirstie Alley’s suitor, a jet-setting corporate raider, from 1989 to 1990. As with Falstaff and other Shakespearean characters whose flaws are obvious, “with ‘Cheers,’ the attraction was that’s where all the failures met,” Rees says. “And good plays, like Chekhov and Shakespeare, they show you people’s frailty.”

Even now, Rees looks back on his TV experience with as much of a director’s eye as an actor’s. “When Ted Danson was in ‘Cheers,’ I bet people thought, well, he’s just being himself,” Rees says. “What Ted Danson did in ‘Cheers’ was a great piece of acting, but no one can appreciate it. I just want to go on record as saying it’s tough just to do what he did--to be yourself and be that brilliantly funny and tough and self-effacing and silly.”

Rees’ understanding of the acting process also endears him to his peers. “He’s brilliant,” says Neuwirth, who is also a “Cheers” veteran, although she did not appear with Rees.

“He’s incredibly inspiring. Roger starts talking and you can’t wait to start working. His vision, his knowledge and his insight are so clear. Also, he’s a deeply kind person, extremely warm and supportive, so you know you’re safe. You know that he knows what he’s talking about, so you can trust him completely. His attention is focused far away from himself, on everyone else in the room and what they’re doing.”

Not surprisingly, Rees credits his success as a director to his actors. “I get really great people,” he says. “I think it’s because I’m able to not be as frightening as other directors, because I know how difficult [acting] is. You have to be very strong and generous as a director. The art of theater is by its nature compromise.”

So far, his approach seems to be working.

“I find more and more that I’ve become part of the community,” he says. “I feel like this is where I belong now.”

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“The Merry Wives of Windsor,” Old Globe Theatre, Balboa Park, San Diego. Tuesdays-Sundays, 8 p.m. Ends Oct. 9. $23-$39. (619) 239-2255.