Two drama-school contemporaries with "Middlemarch" as their show reel have joined the cavalcade of romantic young English actors. Jonathan Firth (he played Fred Vincy) and his ex-flatmate Rufus Sewell (Will Ladislaw) have both been typecast lately as Byronic poet-dreamers. The twenty-seven-year- old Firth, making his debut with the Royal Shakespeare Company, is Henry VI, the "easy-melting King," last played on the R.S.C. stage by Ralph Fiennes. Like a flower child, with his Lancastrian-rose bangle, and his dark hair curling over a slender headband of a crown, Firth brings a sweet serenity to the role. "He has a delicacy, a fragility, and an interesting inner life," Katie Mitchell, the director, says.

Mitchell, who, at twenty-nine, is one of London's most innovative new directors, is also tackling Shakespeare for the first time. Known for an uncompromising approach to theatre, she uncovers the bones of the play, heightening rather than trying to disguise its emblematic, morality-play crudeness. Almost all the actors are new to Shakespeare, and Mitchell sees this as a way of testing herself, but it also enhances the apprenticeship quality of the work. Even the liveliest character, Richard, son of the of York, is an Old Vice caricature, and is played with leering, one-track intensity by Tom Smith as a fifteenth-century skinhead with a nail-chewing habit. Henry seems shadowy by contrast--until his final, impassioned speech, when "at last," Firth says, "he cuts loose and unleashes all his pent-up feelings." "Henry VI: The Battle for the Throne" opens on November 2nd in Los Angeles. ~