It can’t be easy being cast alongside Mark Rylance at the moment. The former Artistic Director of Shakespeare’s Globe won just about every theatre accolade going in the past year for his remarkable performance in Jez Butterworth’s hugely acclaimed play Jerusalem. In Matthew Warchus’s revival of the Laurence Olivier Award-winning comedy La Bête, the talented performer is given the space and time to deliver a 30-minute monologue packed with tricks and party pieces while the rest of the cast, which includes 11-time Emmy nominee and Tony Award-winner David Hyde Pierce, watch on as he steals the show. Surely for a performer of Pierce’s stature, that must grate just a little? Apparently not.

“His gifts are unbelievable as an actor and there are certainly actors with that kind of talent – especially playing the kind of role he’s playing, which is a kind of obsessive, full-of-himself vulgarian – who would be really good at that part but you would not want to be on stage with them. Mark is not that man. He is an incredibly generous, gracious actor, which is not to say he’s not challenging on stage. He loves to play and I love to go wherever he ends up going.”

Pierce, who is chatting to me on the phone from the comfort of the hotel room that has become his London home during the run of La Bête, is enjoying his time in the capital. While he may be missing his dogs, the feeling of settlement that comes with actually living in London, rather than being a tourist, is bringing out the best in the actor best known for playing younger brother Niles in long-running US sitcom Frasier.

“I think our show takes people on a trip that they’re just not expecting,” he says of the David Hirson comedy about the clash between a high-minded classical dramatist (Pierce) and a lowbrow street clown (Rylance). “I don’t think, even if you had read the play, you would expect where this particular production takes you.”

This inventiveness in the revival of the show that won the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Comedy in 1992, he puts down to director Matthew Warchus, for whom he has as much admiration as he does for Rylance: “I am amazed at his ability to really find all the elements of this play; its darkest moments, its funniest moments, the broadest farce, the smallest heartbreaking things. To mine all of these things and have them be present in the production, I’m in awe of him for that.”

It was the combination of Warchus, Rylance and the play that originally attracted Pierce to the production when American producer Scott Landis called him with the proposition. Having signed up following a read through of the play in London, the casting of Joanna Lumley, in a role that was altered for this production from a prince to a princess to include “a strong woman’s voice” in the play, convinced him he had made the correct decision. “It told me, without ever having worked with Matthew, that we were on the same page as far as how we viewed the play and what we imagined it to be.”

Pierce’s involvement with La Bête could have been very different. He auditioned for the original Broadway production, which ran at the Eugene O’Neill Theater in 1991. He didn’t get the role, but swiftly moved on to be cast in Frasier. La Bête ran for just 25 performances, closing after a stinking review from New York Times critic Frank Rich. Though Rich may not have liked the piece, “Every single person I have spoken to who actually saw the production,” Pierce tells me, “has said ‘That was one of the great theatrical events of my lifetime. I’ll never forget it.’” It also received five Tony Award nominations.

Pierce is aware, then, of the risky nature of this revival, which runs in London before a Broadway transfer that was booked before anyone knew how popular the piece would be. There are many expectations flitting around the production: the Olivier Award and Tony nominations, the public feeling, the aforementioned damning review. The show’s history leaves it open to more comparisons than if it were on a website advertised by a meerkat. This is why, along with Rylance and Warchus, the show’s producers, which include Sonia Friedman, receive so much of Pierce’s praise: “I am thrilled that these producers are willing to take a risk on something that is not the most obvious choice to do in tough economic times. The choices that they’ve made, as far as I can tell, have all been artistic choices as opposed to financial choices. They chose to cast an entire company – half Brits, half Americans – that will go with the play. The producers’ hearts are in the right place, but they’re not blind either, they know what a risk this is but they’re up to the challenge.”

Pierce knows all about challenge, his natural tendency being to push forward with a new goal. After 11 years playing the lovelorn, neurotic Niles in Frasier, collecting an Emmy nomination in each year of the show’s run, it would have been easy to have become a sitcom regular. Instead, he set his sights on trying his hand at a slightly different field, musical theatre.

As a child he had played the piano, and had even gone on to study classical piano at Yale University, so music had always played a large part in his life. But, as he says, “You don’t just walk in and do eight shows a week of a Broadway musical. You need stamina and vocal training and all these other things.” So, during his time on Frasier, he invested in both vocal coaching and dance lessons so that when the show came to an end he would be ready for that next challenge.

The challenge in question just happened to be Monty Python’s Spamalot, in which he originated the role of Sir Robin. It was another production that came with added pressure. The Pythons’ comedy is loved by many; any unsuccessful messing with a treasure like Monty Python And The Holy Grail, on which the musical was based, could have been greeted with taunts more pointed than ‘Your mother was a hamster and your father smelled of elderberries’. Pierce’s nerves were settled after the first read through of the script, at which he performed all of the Eric Idle parts while perched next to the former Python and creator of the show. “If I could do Eric Idle in front of Eric Idle, then I didn’t worry about what anyone else thought.”

From Spamalot, Pierce went on to star in the Kander and Ebb musical Curtains, for which he won a Tony Award. When I ask about the coveted accolade, the highest you can get in American theatre, he sounds distinctly underwhelmed. “It was a very nice thing,” he says.

I guess when you receive an award nomination every year for 11 years the novelty of recognition wears off. So what of the time he spent in what is universally accepted as one of the greatest sitcoms of all time?

“It was 11 years of, really, a great group of actors, astonishing writing and a lot of shared life. That’s a long time, so we all have those things in common; cast members getting married and having children. Several of us had our parents appear in guest slots just sitting at the bar or in the coffee shop, and now some of those folks are gone. There’s a lot of deep, rich feeling associated with that show.”

I get the feeling, though, that unlike so many successful TV series, Frasier won’t be receiving a television revamp, movie or musical makeover any time soon, certainly not with the involvement of Pierce. He says, of television in general, “I don’t have a lot left undone that makes me want to go back,” so why would he return to a rehashed version of the sitcom? Better to let it live on in ageless reruns.

He has a new project fermenting, which may or may not come to fruition following the end of his journey with La Bête. Like so many actors, he won’t give too much away this early on, as nothing has been confirmed, but I can be fairly certain it won’t be a stint on a reality TV show. “It does seem to appeal to some of our lower instincts about enjoying people being humiliated and being able to feel better about ourselves because we see someone who isn’t talented trying to do something,” he says of the genre that rose in popularity while he was starring in Frasier and now dominates the airwaves.

I venture that this battle between the lowbrow and highbrow that is being fought in television scheduling meetings around the world, is reflected in La Bête. “As much as it’s about high art and low art,” he replies, “it’s about ideals versus real life. We all have those two things in us; our better selves that we wish we could be all the time and the reality of daily life. The play’s very much about what it’s like to be an insider and what it’s like to be on the outside; Mark’s character being completely outside the world of the play, trying to get in. It ends up being a debate and a contest and a question of who will stay on the inside – the in group – and who will be cast out … like a reality show.”

Stillness is a great quality in an actor, and a rare one. David Hyde Pierce is pretty much still most of the time. We are sitting in his underground dressing room at the Comedy Theatre, where he has just opened, to very favourable reviews, alongside Mark Rylance and Joanna Lumley in La Bête, a rhyming play about 17th-century French actors.

I say that I won’t even mention Frasier. He neither twitches nor smiles. Then, of course, I do mention Frasier. Same reaction. He’s placed his early lunchtime tuna baguette to one side – there’s a matinée in two hours’ time – and offered me a glass of apple juice. He’s concentrated, watchful, Buddha-like, even though he’s wearing sportswear and trainers. His crash-pad day bed is tidily arranged in the corner.

I realise now that those slow burns and sudden eruptions of mania as Dr Niles Crane in television’s most popular ever sitcom – it ran for 11 years between 1993 and 2004 – are rooted in a steadily controlled lifestyle and demeanour. If Pierce has high blood pressure, I’m a Dutchman.

There’s not much small talk, not with journalists, anyway. He was born and raised in Saratoga Springs in upstate New York, and went to Yale to study music, switching to a double masters in English and theatre studies. As a student he played in Beckett and Gilbert and Sullivan, and made his Broadway debut, auspiciously enough, in Beyond Therapy by Christopher Durang in 1982.

Was it true that the role of Niles Crane, Frasier’s younger brother, was created for him because he looked like Kelsey Grammer? “In a word, yes. The casting director said to the writers that if Frasier were to have a younger brother … and so they came up with me and the construct of two brothers, two therapists with different kinds of therapy and different educational backgrounds. And that was that.”

Wasn’t it a grind, year in, year out? “Not at all. With a live audience very week, and those scripts, it was always perfect for me. And there is always time off; I’d have four months out and do a movie or a play. One of the great experiences of my life was doing a two-hander, Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks, onstage with Uta Hagen; it was the last thing she ever did, and there was something magical in our partnership. I learned so much from her, just being with her on stage.”

Talking of legends, Pierce also worked, pre-Frasier, with Peter Brook, playing the house servant Yasha in a specially re-vamped US version of Brook’s Bouffes du Nord Cherry Orchard, alongside Brian Dennehy, Linda Hunt and the great Ingmar Bergman actor, Erland Josephson. So his renewed stage career is a happy return, not a tentative new start.

We all know he is, as the New York Times put it in 2000, “a comic-pathetic actor of genius, a sort of modern day Buster Keaton for TV.” So had he read the reviews, which have been mixed, of La Bête? He gives me a look which says, “Why would I have done that?”

The trouble with his role, that of Elomire (or Molière the playwright), is that he has to stand and listen to Rylance as the upstart thespian Valère spouting brilliantly through false teeth for half an hour. I was going to ask if he felt that acting was as much about listening as speaking, but the question sticks in my throat, already unworthy of his consideration.

“When my sister read it,” he offers – at just turned 51, he’s the youngest of four in a close family, many of them recently over for the première – “she said, what do you do all that time?” One critic has suggested that he’s slowly realising that he’s playing the wrong part. I’m not even going there … “In a way, we are the audience on the stage. Everyone knows someone in their life, hopefully not as extreme as Valère, who prattles on so you can’t actually believe they’re still talking.”

So why had he taken the sponge-like role of Elomire? “The project came to me, although the writer, David Hirson, reminded me – I had completely forgotten – that I’d auditioned for the role of the Prince [it's now a princess, played by Lumley] in the first production in 1991. And not got it. It was near the end of my time in New York, before I went out to LA for Frasier, and they hired a fine actor called Dylan Baker. I’m told I was very close.

“I never saw the show, but it’s remembered for two reviews: Frank Rich’s in The New York Times, which killed it; and John Simon’s in New York magazine, equally dismissive, which was written in rhyming couplets. When I re-read the play, I wasn’t interested in the Prince, but Elomire fascinated me. Our director, Matthew Warchus, knew there was a dark side to the play, and we discovered that; it was always going to be worth the journey.”

But is the piece really any more than an over-contrived conflict between the meretricious and the serious in theatre? “Matthew describes it as a conflict between idealism and reality, and each of us has our better self and our practical self, and every day is a process of juggling those claims on us. And there’s also what it means to be an insider and be cast out, which is what happens to Elomire. He’s an insider in a world Valère wants to gatecrash, and it may be poisoning him … “

When he first left Frasier, Pierce bounced on to the Broadway stage in the Monty Python musical Spamalot, playing Sir Robin (“not quite so brave as Sir Lancelot”) and leading a flat-out funny ensemble number about the need for Jews in all Broadway shows: “There’s a very small percentile who enjoy a dancing Gentile.” I saw the show on its first weekend, with queues of obese Mid-Westerners, savvy New Yorkers, musical theatre buffs and geeky Python fans snaking right round the block and down to Times Square.

“I’d been waiting for this for many years, and had been in training, and singing in benefits. I knew that once Frasier finished, musical theatre was the next thing for me. I wasn’t obsessed with Monty Python but, when I was a kid, after I’d finished my organ practice one night in the church, the show came on a local PBS channel; it was the sketch about the tedious life of a chartered accountant, not even one of their best sketches, but it was bored into my brain from that moment.”

The fact that the Spamalot director was Mike Nichols hit another button: Pierce was a devotee of the deadpan cabaret sketches Nichols recorded with his comedy partner (and then wife) Elaine May. “Mike and Elaine’s work was a huge influence, so was Bob Newhart’s … and Alec Guinness. They all made a big impression, but there was also something in me drawn to their sardonic style of humour. But I enjoy slapstick, too. In Frasier we had the chance to do both.”

I think of Niles with a parakeet on his head at a dinner party, or setting his pants on fire, or pretending that a sack of flour is his baby, or trailing around after Daphne Moon like a spaniel with indigestion. Are the Frasier gang still close? “Totally. We went through a lot together, in our personal lives as well. I’ve just been to see Kelsey in La Cage aux Folles on Broadway, and I came to London for Jane Leeves’s wedding.”

Ah, so there might be a stage version, perhaps even Frasier: the Musical? Another blank look. “No, we don’t want to do anything like that. It’s something we’re all very proud of and are happy to leave in syndication. Life goes on.” And he loves London. Is he bugged when he goes round the shops? “No. People are friendly when they recognise me. It’s a great gift to be able to pretend to live here for four months. It feels like home.”

He’s been to Evensong in St Paul’s and the National Gallery and is planning to catch as many concerts as possible. His last Broadway show, for which he won a Tony award, was a “theatrical” musical, Curtains, by John Kander and Fred Ebb, and he went the other night to see a Guildhall School production of it. “It was very moving. I cried, seeing this show we had created done by these amazing kids, with a really fine orchestra.”

His partner, TV writer and producer Brian Hargrove, has just returned to New York, where La Bête follows in September. I wish him and the play better luck this time round with The New York Times. He doesn’t respond, but shows me with an almost eerie politeness to the stage door. And he shuffles quietly back towards his bunker and his baguette.

I’m half expecting David Hyde Pierce to be trying to iron his trousers. At the very least I’m hoping for a bit of super-neurotic horseplay. But in a south London rehearsal room, the former Frasier star is almost unrecognisable. He is small and very still. He has a clipped moustache and is sporting an ugly pair of shiny black tracksuit bottoms. Niles would have had a heart attack.

Perhaps most discomfitingly, in the space of an hour Pierce barely smiles once. If his face wasn’t largely the same, it would be hard to believe that Niles Crane once sprang from the same body.

Pierce is in town for La Bête, David Hirson’s 1992 Molière-style comedy written in rhyming couplets. The play reunites Mark Rylance with Boeing-Boeing director Matthew Warchus, and Pierce admits it was the chance to work opposite Rylance that swung it for him.

“I saw Mark in Jerusalem,” he says. “The guy can do just about anything.”

Still – rhyming couplets? A play about fops and fools set in 17th-century France? It sounds a long way from the whipsmart urban wit in the funniest sitcom ever written.

Pierce almost starts a grin and then thinks better of it. “La Bête is very funny but it’s about more than just laughs,” he says. “The benchmark is to make it feel like real language.”

To be fair to Pierce, who is in fact extremely courteous once you get over the shock of him not sharing a molecule of Niles’s DNA, it’s been six years since the demise of NBC’s Frasier and, for this serious-minded east coast actor at least, life has moved on.

He refused endless film offers while he was making the TV show, mainly because all were variants of a snobbish, ultra-fastidious psychiatrist.

Since 2004 he has spent much of his time in the theatre in New York (which is where he started out), winning a Tony award for his performance in the Broadway musical Curtains and appearing in the Arthurian spoof musical Spamalot.

“That was absolute bliss,” he says heartfully. “I was a huge fan of Monty Python when I was in high school. As broad and absurd as their situations are, I was always drawn to the seriousness with which they attacked their material.”

You can see more than a trace of the Pythons in his performance in Frasier. Niles combined the physical slapstick of Buster Keaton with the Pythons’ surreal comedy and Jacques Tati’s sublime lack of self-awareness.

Pierce refuses to define himself as a comic actor but it’s clear that comedy is his engine; he also admits to an early love for Gilbert & Sullivan.

“I couldn’t ever see myself doing an Ibsen play,” he says drily. There is something of the geeky intellectual about him too: a Yale English and theatre major, he has immersed himself in Milton’s poetry as part of his research for La Bête, read books about English rhyme and metre, and visited the Duke of Wellington’s London home, Apsley House.

He earned an absolute fortune during Frasier but you sense he was never really in it for the money.

“I was absolutely as happy being an out-of-work actor in New York as I have ever been at the height of my perceived success,” he says. “I just loved that life. I loved how it made you see the world and the chance it gave you to do whatever it was that came along.”

He says he had to immediately go somewhere quiet when he won the Tony, just to take it in.

“Without undermining my TV career, I grew up watching the Tony awards not thinking: ‘Oh, some day.’ Never in a million years did I consider it a possibility.”

He is, you suspect, intensely private. A California resident, he married his partner of 25 years in 2008. Two weeks later California voted against same-sex marriages and Pierce is still angry.

“As a person who is least happy calling attention to themselves, to have to be suddenly very public about their life, and who felt very angry about the government interfering, was very painful. I’d love to just shut up about gay rights but so many gay men are not able to live their lives in the same meaningful way as other people.”

An actor unhappy about getting attention? Surely a contradiction.

“Actually, most actors are the same. You only show off on stage because that’s the place where you aren’t you. Acting gives you permission to do stuff you’ve never done before.”

With Pierce that’s really what it’s all about.

As George Osborne’s age of austerity looms over the UK like a raincloud, those seeking a bit of consolatory sunshine should head to the Comedy Theatre. There a rather strange little play written in iambic pentameters is threatening to be the hit of the summer. La Bête is set in the Languedoc and takes its comic tone from Molière, but in fact didn’t land on the page till more than three centuries after his death when it sprang from the mind of a young New York playwright called David Hirson. Broadway was unkind to it: it closed after 25 performances, but its producers had enough faith in La Bête to bring it to London where its subsequent critical and commercial success won it the 1992 Olivier Award for Best Comedy.

The producers’ expectations for this latest revival can be gauged from one glance at the cast list. Amid the cut and thrust of London’s entertainment economy, La Bête has pulled in three prizefighters: Mark Rylance, David Hyde Pierce, and Joanna Lumley. Only the dead can have failed to hear this year’s raves about Rylance’s swaggeringly anarchic turn as Johnny ‘Rooster’ Byron in Jerusalem; as Niles in Frasier, Pierce’s beautifully timed nervous tics and anally retentive melancholy won him thousands of devotees on both sides of the Atlantic; and between her Patsy beehive and the Gurkhas, Lumley has eclipsed the Queen as a national treasure. True, there’s no such thing as a guaranteed hit in theatre (the ghost of Arthur Miller’s Resurrection Blues looms large over any such complacent predictions) but consider too that the director is Matthew ‘Boeing Boeing‘ Warchus, and forecasts of a theatrical warm front heading in the direction of Panton Street don’t seem too far-fetched.

So what exactly has this play done to merit such a cast at this particular point in time? Is it a seering satire on financial corruption that resonates profoundly with our age? Er, no. Is it a timeless comedy about relationships that simultaneously pinpoints the absurdity of the modern condition? Um, not quite. So what is it? “It’s a wild child,” ventures Hirson when we have lunch together early in the rehearsal process, “it’s this living thing, and some people are angered by it, and some people love it. Even when it failed when it was first put on in New York, there were many people who loved it passionately. I think some people reacted against it because there’s no model for this kind of thing – it’s a very strange play, it’s written in rhyme, and back then I was a first-time playwright. I don’t think it was to do with what the play said because – well, who knows what it said? The more I’ve aged, the more I think I had a false sense then of what the play was.”

What the play definitely is about – in narrative terms – is a princess (played by Lumley, in earlier versions of the play the character was a prince) who’s getting bored with the idealistic pretensions of her resident playwright Elomire (Pierce). So she introduces to Elomire’s troupe a street performer, Valère (Rylance), a monstrous buffoon whose vanity blinds him to others’ sensibilities, any notion of courtesy and his own spectacular lack of talent. While Elomire recoils at the pong of Valère’s pretensions, the princess sees him as a necessary breath of fresh air. The result is a highly entertaining verbal duel awash with malapropisms, preposterous metaphors and bathos which ends up sending one of the great pretenders out into the cold.

Broadbrush comedy abounds: and after watching his transformation as Johnny ‘Rooster’ Byron, it’s enjoyable to imagine how Rylance will metamorphose for the bullfrog puffings of Valère. Yet there’s an extraordinary precision to this comedy too which catches in your mind: and talking to Hirson it’s striking that the perfectionist rather than the comedian predominates. A graduate of Yale and Oxford, he’s an accomplished pianist whose talent for translation at university led him to do a well-received translation of the Scarlatti opera Gli equivoci nel sembiante. Its success sowed the seeds of suspicion that writing drama in rhyme might be his thing. At the end of the interview, he tells me a very funny story about how – as a graduate student at Oxford – he passed out at his desk after spending the whole night writing a theatre review for the TLS, and responded when a friend woke him up by sitting up and shouting, “What more do they want of me?” The tale contributes to the picture of a man who painstakingly refines whatever he works on till it meets his complete satisfaction. Which is probably why, beneath La Bête’s more obvious laughs, it’s possible to discern an intricate web of observations about the delusions, vanities and compromised principles that shape all of our lives daily – dangerous truths that allow the play to haunt you, not least as you wonder whether it’s Valère or Elomire who’s the greatest fool.

Just before the play transfers from the rehearsal studios to the Comedy Theatre, I go to meet Pierce, Lumley, and Rylance during their lunchbreak. I’m interested to know if the play is affecting them as strongly as their distinctive styles will inevitably affect the play. Pierce – salt-and-pepper bearded and politely self-contained – displays a pincer-tight intelligence in his observations: “I’ve been surprised at how much it’s affected me away from rehearsals. I’m not sleeping – and not just the usual, ‘Oh, we’re having an audience on Saturday’ – not sleeping. It’s going deeper, which is good. Matthew [Warchus] hoped there would be disturbing elements for an audience, and I think we’re tampering with those.”

Rylance sits there smiling, before lobbing a small bomb into the conversation. “It’s a little like McDonald’s moving into your town.” Pierce and Lumley flash amused, raised-eyebrow glances at him, evidently well used to his tangential takes. Valère is like McDonald’s? “Absolutely,” he replies in his slightly sing-song voice, “I’m McDonald’s. It’s about the process of all our towns becoming homogenised, a transformation of culture.”

Lumley – slayer of dragons, terror of Gordon Brown and, according to an article in the Independent, absolutely unflappable even when a man pulled out a gun in the pub where the interview was taking place – displays no Boadicea-style airs and graces. Here she’s one of the gang: “I do the Coward warm-up,” she says when talking about the pace at which she has to deliver her lines.

“The Coward warm-up, or the cowardly warm-up?” interjects Rylance. But beneath the joking it quickly becomes clear that another hidden surprise in this deceptively frivolous play is the huge demand it’s placing on the actors’ bodies. “I’ve worked in musicals the past few years, and I’m so glad, because I learned things you need doing a play like this,” declares Pierce. “You can’t miss a syllable,” adds Lumley, “it’s like music, which means you can tell when it goes wrong … which of course, it doesn’t.”

In the play Valère may be the fool but in rehearsals, brought to life by Rylance, it’s obvious he’s snared everyone’s imagination. Lumley looks at him and smiles. “It’s funny to see this supple-looking boy when you’ve seen him playing Rooster, who was a barrel-chested monster.” Pierce concurs, “I can say from working with Mark that what’s astonishing about his performance is that it comes out of the seams. You watch it evolve from what happens in the moment, and that sometimes transforms him physically, it’s amazing…”

Rylance sits there, lightly amused, as if they are talking about someone other than him. As indeed they might be: the way he transforms himself between roles – from the daintier-than-thou Olivia in his celebrated Twelfth Night, to the hollering hunk of humanity that was Rooster – implies that he is not just one person, but like Walt Whitman, contains multitudes. “I’m a pretty mundane person really,” he says eventually. “I just like to play: when I’m in a playful mode I’m more open to inspiration. I do plan things sometimes, but then they’re a bit crap.” I’m not a betting woman, but it seems unlikely the word ‘crap’ is going to feature strongly when they eventually let the critics in.

Forty-six years ago in Saratoga Springs, New York, a five-year-old boy named David would stand at the top of the stairs and pretend to be shot. His parents, at breakfast, would hear the thudding of their youngest child crashing down the staircase. “I loved the idea of performing death scenes,” he explains. “It is the most dramatic thing you can do.” About 30 years later, David was acting in a television sitcom. He was in a kitchen and, in an attempt to impress the woman he loved, was trying to look cool by hoisting himself onto the counter top. He kept failing. Then he tried so hard, his head crashed into some hanging pans and he toppled over and fell to the floor.

The two incidents gave birth to the greatest physical comedian since Buster Keaton. He learnt to fall as a child, then, at a critical moment, the men behind the camera spotted how well he did it. “It was funny, and, after that, the writers started looking for ways for me to hurt myself.”

David is David Hyde Pierce, and the television series was Frasier, the finest flowering of the sitcom art. David played Niles Crane, Frasier’s neurotic and inhibited, but also passionate and romantic, younger brother. Dotted through Frasier’s 263 episodes over 11 years, there are Niles-centred scenes of unsurpassed physical comedy. Alone in Frasier’s apartment, he cuts himself, faints at the sight of blood, fails to do some ironing and sets fire to the place. On another occasion, depressed, he retreats to the bathroom. A shot rings out. But it is not a shot, it is the explosion of his father’s Hot’n’Foamy shaving-cream dispenser. Niles emerges, looking like a snowman, to announce that he feels hot and foamy. A pet cockatoo attaches itself permanently to his head. Extravagant panic attacks sweep the poor man, forcing him to hide under the piano. There are hundreds of such scenes — and almost everybody I know remembers them all.

And here he is, in a rehearsal room in Southwark, southeast London. You have to blink before you realise it is indeed him. He is not wearing one of those ludicrously baggy Armani suits that made Niles look like a glove puppet. He is wearing big trainers, jeans and a sweatshirt. He also has a beard that, at first glance, conceals the rather gaunt features of Niles. He is amiable, serious, unjoking and apparently physically competent. He is highly self-possessed. His eyes do not flicker anxiously. In short, he is not like Niles; he is, like all the very best, a pro.

Pierce is rehearsing his first West End show, David Hirson’s La Bête, a satirical comedy written in verse and set in 17th-century France. In New York in 1991 it bombed, although it did well when it moved over to London in 1992. One of the prime reasons for its Broadway failure was a scathing review by the revered New York Times critic Frank Rich — “an almost insufferably smug example of the exact middlebrow fluff it wants to attack.”

“I actually have,” says Niles — sorry, David — choosing his words carefully, “myself been the beneficiary of a few quite severe criticisms from Frank Rich over the past few years. But I run into him and his wife regularly, and I have talked to him about this play. He wasn’t dismissive, he was supportive of the idea of doing it again.”

Anyway, the 1991 production didn’t have Niles … David. He was, at the time, a reasonably successful theatre and television actor, but nothing more. Now he has the greatest sitcom ever made under his belt, as well as his sublime performance as an English-accented Sir Robin, the Not-Quite-So-Brave-As-Sir-Lancelot, in Spamalot on Broadway. (Watch him on YouTube doing ‘You Won’t Succeed on Broadway if You Don’t Have Any Jews.’) Back in Saratoga Springs, Pierce was the runt of the litter, the youngest child of four by a long way. His father was an insurance salesman with theatrical aspirations. “He did amateur shows. I never saw him act, but I read a review of him in a play that said he was brilliant. He played a half-baked nut in an asylum, with a Napoleon hat, and the review said he belonged on Broadway.”

He says his childhood was “completely contented”, which sounds a bit overstated to be entirely true. Was the fact that he was gay an issue? “Not then — I had no idea. It didn’t mean anything. I didn’t identify myself as that. I think, if I was at all isolated, it came from being the youngest, although it might be in my nature. I love people, but I am also very contented on my own.” The British press reported that he had outed himself when he married his long-term lover, Brian Hargrove, in 2008. In fact, he had been generally known to be gay in America since Frasier began in 1993.

“The way coming out is, every time you meet someone who doesn’t know you’re gay, and you tell them, you come out. The idea that it happens once is a fiction. Brian and I were in the American tabloids from the early years of Frasier — they hid behind trees and took pictures.”

His family were Episcopalians — American Anglicans, basically — and, aged 12, David decided he wanted to be a priest. Wisely, the minister suggested he go into his father’s business instead. His childhood faith swiftly became agnosticism when a friend introduced him to Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, but his love of church music persisted. He played the piano, learnt the organ and, finally, went to Yale to study classical piano. At this, he failed. “It was not only that I wasn’t good enough, I didn’t have the interest — I wasn’t interested in the coursework you had to do to be a music major.”

He switched to a combination of music and drama, and for 12 years after graduating, he was a happy and fairly successful actor. Comedy, both physical and non-­physical, kept intruding. “I did a lot of stage combat. I did a production of Cyrano where I was both the understudy of Cyrano and the person fencing with Cyrano, and I played Laertes and understudied Hamlet. It was an inappropriately funny Laertes.” Then, one day, he was picked to play Niles on the basis that he looked enough like Kelsey Grammer to be Frasier’s brother. Grammer having filled out somewhat, this now seems improbable.

Today, the show would never have got past the first pitch to the network: two fussy, over-refined psychiatrist brothers in Seattle have a dad who lives with the elder, a radio star; dad is a retired cop who needs a live-in physical therapist, with whom the younger brother falls in love. The setup seems arbitrary and novelish, rather than comic. In 1993, though, it was seen primarily as a spin-off from the highly successful Cheers, in which Frasier had been an overintellectual barfly in Boston.

Aged 12, David decided he wanted to be a priest. Wisely, the minister suggested he go into his father’s business instead “If it hadn’t been a sequel to Cheers, if it had just come up full-blown in that form, I don’t know that they would have put it on the air, if I’m truly honest. But they knew the characters and they said, ‘Okay, we know what this is.”

The wonder of the show is that it is both highly theatrical and fantastically upmarket. There is a live audience, and all the scenery is in the form of stage sets. Although the Cranes are mocked, their highbrow cultural tastes and references are central to the show. Like The Simpsons, Frasier optimistically and bracingly assumes — and gets — intelligent viewers. Yet the eccentric setup was also, Pierce says, topical. “The guys who created the show wondered what a real-life issue was nowadays. They decided it was people finding they had to take care of their parents.”

One of the primary dynamics of the show is the presence of the father in Frasier’s apartment. It is also the father whose need for care brings the English Daphne into the picture. Ah, Daphne …

From the moment he sees her, Niles is deeply in love. It is a love that takes more than 200 episodes to be acknowledged by both, and it is a love that makes the Ross and Rachel romance in Friends look bloodless and irritating, especially as Niles is married to someone else (whom we never see). For all his neuroses and in spite of his invisible, sexless, domineering and even more neurotic wife, Niles was consumed by pure passion. Nothing better demonstrates Pierce’s quality as a comic actor than his infinite variations on the look of hopeless, hangdog longing when in the presence of Daphne. Sexually, he is a mess. At one point, he replaces one thin, domineering wife with another, his plastic surgeon.

He even, drunk, goes to bed with Frasier’s thin, domineering ex-wife, Lilith. On waking up, he says: “It happens all the time … in Arkansas!”

“He was a very passionate guy,” Pierce says. “There was a great episode with him and Daphne where every single scene was titled as a version of a Tennessee Williams play. The air conditioning was off, and it was hot, and they were both in his apartment for some reason, and she was all sexy, and it was great. That’s what I like about him. He was neurotic and he was prissy, but he had this deep, deep love for Daphne.” Eventually, of course, they tied the knot.

Pierce has said elsewhere, though, that he would not want to spend too much time with Niles. “Well,” he shrugs, “he has a good heart.”

The show took 11 years of his life. One day, the producers called in the cast and said the next season would be the last. “It was a real privilege that the network didn’t end the show, the producers did.” Pierce was not anxious because, he says, he seldom looks into the future. He had, however, been having voice coaching, with the vague idea that he wanted to be in a stage musical. Then Spamalot, the stage version of the film Monty Python and the Holy Grail, fell into his lap. At once, he was no longer just Niles.

By the end of Frasier, he would have been earning about $1m per episode, so he would have had plenty of what a friend of mine calls “F-off money”. He could choose his future freely. And, in a relaxed, professional kind of way, he has done so. He lives in Los Angeles with Hargrove and picks and chooses his projects. It all seems very calm and exact and — apart, perhaps, from the exactness — nothing like Niles.

Niles Crane was one of the great fictional creations of our time, a modernist romantic — neurotic, locked in pretension, anxiety and inhibition, but buffeted by an intense and pure passion. Of course, he was written like that by the best television writers in the world. But if runt David had not learnt to throw himself down the stairs, he would never have happened.

La Bête is at the Comedy, SW1, from Saturday until September 4