WHAT does an actor do when reprising a role? How do you bring something different to the mix? How do you make it fresh?

That’s the challenge facing Alison Peebles this week, starring in Oran Mor production of Frances and Ethel.

Set April 1961 in a little rehearsal room in Manhattan, Judy Garland (Frances Thorburn) is a day away from playing what will become the legendary Carnegie Hall concerts.

Struggling under the crushing weight of expectation, not fully recovered from illness, she calls on her old friend Sal (John Kielty) to keep her company, calm her nerves.

But of course, Ethel (Alison) shows up too. And Judy’s world is turned upside down.

“The idea is not to change things for the sake of it, but to reinvestigate the piece,” says Alison, one of Scotland’s top theatre actors.

“The first time around you only have two weeks rehearsals, so this gives you a chance to really take it forward.

“It gives a chance to say ‘This bit never really worked for me’. Or ‘At this part I felt I was going through the motions.’

“You come up with more layers, and you find out more of the truth.”

Was Ethel a monster? Was she misunderstood? “I think Ethel didn’t want to be on stage but she recognised there was a talent in Judy her other daughters didn’t have.

“But she also knew she had to push that forward. She moved to LA, without her husband, just so her daughter would be in the right place.”

So she was Ethel nice? “No, but there is this thing with artists/performers who don’t have the guts and energy to go out there. It could be seen as a laziness or reluctance. Ethel didn’t accept that.”

But Judy was just a wee girl?

“That’s true,” says Alison. “And she was certainly abused.

“In many of the major film studios the stars had the pick of the young girls. And it was rumoured Spencer Tracy was one of the stars who took advantage of Judy.

“It’s shocking. Nowadays, you know of the horrors of prescription drugs but back she was popping them all the time. You can now understand why.

“She had a horrible life.”

Alison will bring a nuanced performance to the role. Ethel may have turned a blind eye to the real needs of her daughter but she wasn’t entirely evil.

“I’ve been trying to find the connection with Ethel and her husband,” for example.

“He was gay but there was a love between them.

“I want to show there was something there. And it means I’m not just playing a harridan.”

Alison took a circuitous route into acting. One leaving high School in Edinburgh she went to art school.

“I never stopped drawing as a teenager, but when I went to art school I thought I would be really good because I’d been the best at school.

“But I was up against everyone else who was the best at their school. And I never really felt part of it. I stopped going to classes and I was having too much fun.

“Looking back, at seventeen I had no idea what I was doing. I was too young to make a career decision.”

But acting had never been an option. “Acting was what foreign people did.

“I’d been to panto, and I saw ballet once. But that was it.”

Alison became involved in street theatre and went on to work as a community artist in the Lake District. Gradually acting found her.

“I became part of a small theatre company and by this time I desperately wanted to act.”

Since this time she has proved herself one of Scotland’s most talented film, tv and theatre actresses, working in rep theatre, up Communicado Theatre Company.

Now, she reveals this summer is set to produce an incredible acting challenge.

Alison is set to play Lucifer in a new theatre production in Wakefield Cathedral.

“How great is that,” she enthuses. “Roles don’t come along too often for older women.

“It’s set in the eighties and takes in the world around, the miners, the bankers.

“What I love about is directors going against the grain. I love risks.”

But who will she channel for her Lucifer. Ethel?

“Boris Johnson,” she says, smiling. “He’s not a buffoon. He’s a very dangerous man.”

• Frances and Ethel, Oran Mor, until Saturday.

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Meantime, she’s focused on Ethel. “I wasn’t aware of Judy’s tragedy until I was much older. When I was a student I was into punk rock.

“I wasn’t into musical theatre. I hated Andew Lloyd Weber.

“I loved watching the balck and white Ginger Rogers movies I kijed the Bob Hope comedies.

“But I was more into Barbara Stanwyck film noir. I thought Fred Astaire was too much of a wee gocky guy.

“It was when I started to have lots of gay friends.