The stream of Hollywood bigshots eager to gain credibility by appearing in the West End shows no sign of abating, but they have hardly been rushing to the regional reps. A stint at the Donmar or Almeida is considered glamourous; three weeks in the provinces doesn't have quite the same allure.

Joseph Fiennes is breaking the mould. The 28-year-old star of Stealing Beauty, Shakespeare In Love, Elizabeth and now Enemy At The Gates, the forthcoming movie about the siege of Stalingrad, is about to open at the Sheffield Crucible. His choice of play is equally off-centre; Christopher Marlowe's Edward II. If Fiennes was going to return to the classical theatre - he cut his teeth on the repertoire during three seasons at the Royal Shakespeare Company in the mid-1990's - you'd expect it to be as Hamlet or Richard II, like his older brother Ralph.

But no, Fiennes has been swept off his feet by Marlowe's anti-hero king, a figure trashed by generations of literary critics for his lack of tragic status and absence of self knowledge,who loses his heart to his favorite Gaveston and his kingdom to his restless barons, and who suffers the nastiest death in all of English drama (you know - the one with the red-hot poker).

When Bernard Levin saw Marlowe's play, he suggested the author should be shovelled back in his grave and left to rot. But Fiennes has no time for that sort of talk. "Oh, fuck off," he says good-humouredly, "If you are going to put Marlowe against Shakespeare, then you have to accept that they present two unique, entirely different views of the world. In Edward II the language isn't a foil, like the wit in a play like Hamlet. It is a broadsword, and Marlowe uses it brutally. He is a poet of a different nature. This is a young man's play,and it feels like one. Who knows what Marlowe might have gone on to write if he had lived?"

Marlowe is generally believed to have died at the age of 29, stabbed in a fight after a life as both a spy and writer. His more fervent fans, however, insist that he faked his death and wrote many of the plays now credited to Shakespeare.

Joseph Fiennes has never been one for obvious choices. After giving up an art course for drama school, he at first seemed set on imitating Ralph by going to the RSC and then to Hollywood. But he became as well known for his work in new plays as for his Shakespeare. His performance as Jesus in Dennis Potter's Son of Man was so intense that audiences were moved to tears, if not Christianity.

Fiennes has had just one stage role since he found overnight stardom in 1998's Shakespeare in Love: in Nick Grosso's twentysomething drama Real Classy Affair at the Royal Court. But he has long wanted to do Edward II, after reading it at drama school and seeing Simon Russell Beale in the title role in the RSC's 1991 production.

"There is nothing dressed up about this play," he says. " It is what it is - a muscular, blunt instrument. The occasional mighty line sings out, but on the whole it just tells a good story extremely well. If you get it right, it should have the audience on the edge of their seats." The abscence of Shakespeare's rich imagery will, he feels, be a bonus in performance. At the very least, the audience's unfamiliarity with the play will spare him "some voice on the front row mumbling the lines with you as you plough through them."

Fiennes admits that the play, which is being directed by Michael Grandage, owes some of its appeal to Marlowe's short but action filled life. The more we learn about his time in the Elizabethan secret service and his violent, mysterious death, the harder it is to separate biography from the plays. Even Marlowe's sexuality comes into play in Edward II, in which he writes with modern openness about a king who loses his throne and his life because of his love for another man.

"This is more than just a gay play. It is about politics and society, destiny and the illusion of power as well, but it is very much a play about love. Gaveston was probably Marlowe's ultimate sexual fantasy brought to life - you feel the energy of it. But you also feel the directness of love. It is there in the text: 'Why should you love him whom the world hates so?' 'Because he loves me more than all the world.' Those lines say it all."

They do, but they don't redeem the willful, immature Edward, a character who has the same faults but none of the growing self-knowledge of some of Shakespeare's great creations. "Thats unfair," counters Fiennes. "Edward is ugly and petulant at times. But he is liberated by love. He finds himself, and it is telling that both Gaveston and Spencer, who initially are both out for their own ends, actually fall in love with him. There is something attractive about him, and he does grow - but in a very odd way. For most of the characters in classic texts a light grows in them towards death. But in Edward it is different. He explodes with anger and joy, and the rest of the play is a closing down, like a light being extinguished."

"Extinguished" is a genteel way of describing Edward's appalling death, an end that fitted in with the contemporary belief that crime (in this case sodomy) and punishment should be intimately connected.

"Yes" says Fiennes. "I think some people are going to be suprised. With plays like Blasted and Shopping and Fucking we pride ourselves on being so brave and new about violence on stage. But 400 years ago Marlowe was writing something like this. Sex, power, love and violent murder: Marlowe made sure his play had got it all."