The Shawshank Redemption, Lyceum Theatre

The nation's favourite film, The Shawshank Redemption, has been adapted for the stage and appears at the Lyceum next week with ex-EastEnder Paul Nicholls in the lead role.

Paul, who played Joe Wicks in the soap and was DS Sam Casey in Law & Order, stars as Andy Dufresne, serving a life sentence in prison for murdering his wife and her lover.

Incarcerated at the notorious Shawshank jail, he learns that no-one can survive alone.

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Things get better when he becomes friends with prison fixer Red but then bullying Warden Stammas exploits his talent for accountancy and a desperate plan is born...

Paul talks here in a Q&A.

How would you sum up the character of Andy?

He’s very pragmatic and has, I think, a beautiful soul. But he’s not just one thing – he’s also a fighter and he refuses to give up.

What do you most enjoy about playing him?

There are a lot of layers to Andy and the thing we have in common is that we are both fighters in our own way and we both refuse to give up.

I can also kind of identify with the fact that you can’t be open with everybody. There’s a certain element of him having to keep emotions out of relationships within the prison, which I kind of understand – not that I’ve been in prison. But for me he’s almost superhuman.

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He does crack at some point but he always manages to think clearly under pressure and he’s very intelligent and highly educated. I’m not highly educated, I’m kind of self-taught in a way in various subjects. I never did A-levels.

So immediately the fear was ‘I’m not clever or intelligent enough to play this part’, then you realise that’s not true and you don’t have to have a degree and a masters and a PhD to play the part. You just have to say the lines.

The Shawshank Redemption was a novella, then a film, now a play… Why do you think it enthralls people so much?

I remember my dad ringing me up going ‘Have you seen The Shawshank Redemption?’ and I was like ‘I first saw it years ago and have seen it about 5,000 times!’ He went ‘God, what a film!’

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It’s a story about hope and the human spirit, but the thing that transcends all that is ‘it doesn’t matter what class you are’ – working class people and middle class people and upper class people can all relate to being against the system.

n The Shawshank Redemption is at the Lyceum next Monday to Saturday. Box office: 0114 2496000 or online at Sheffield Theatres