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Actor Robert Powell is going to a garden party with Prince Charles shortly after playing him on stage in the incendiary King Charles III. So, that won’t be awkward at all.

Actor Robert Powell can tell you the trick to doing Prince Charles. “He over-stresses certain words and syllables that don’t need stressing. In conversehhtion, he’ll say ‘well I rehlly don’t understand…’” People who go see Powell in the play King Charles III, however, should not expect a straight-up imitation. “Because you’d have the audience judging the impression, rather than getting involved in the play. Still, every now and then I throw in a mannerism. I have to remind them – because I don’t look like Charles.”

And yet there are things the two men do have in common. Like the 67-year-old Prince of Wales, Powell, 71, has spent his life in the public eye, clocking up 50 years as a star of stage and screen. Both are members of the same London gentlemen’s club (White’s). Powell is a longtime ambassador of the Prince’s Trust, Charles’s charity helping young people find employment. And yes, the actor and the heir apparent are acquainted. “In fact in May, when I get back to England from Oz, we’ve got a [Prince’s Trust] garden party at Buckingham Palace. It will be the first time I’ve met him since I’ve played him,” says Powell. “It will be a curious little confrontation.”

Written in the style of a Shakespearean history play in iambic pentameter, Mike Bartlett’s “future history” play King Charles III imagines the death of Queen Elizabeth and the ascension of Charles to power. While Prince Harry is embroiled in his own scandal involving a new girlfriend, Charles presides over a constitutional crisis. “It’s based in a very solid reality,” Powell says. “You think: good grief, could this happen? Charles [in reality] is a very, very, very conscientious man. Everything he does is driven by trying to get it right. [In the play] he decides to take a stand and use the constitutional right that no British monarch has used in 300 years, and you have a full Shakespearean tragedy.”

Premiering at the Almeida Theatre under the direction of Rupert Goold, Charles went on to score the 2015 Olivier Award for Best New Play. Powell took over the lead role for the UK touring production, which comes to Sydney hosted by the STC. Powell says he didn’t have to finish reading the script to know it was a part he wanted. “It’s extraordinary; a minimasterpiece... audiences go ecstatic.”

Powell shot to international fame playing the title role in Franco Zeffirelli’s all-star 1977 miniseries Jesus of Nazareth. He later starred in two 1980s Ozploitation movies for producer Antony Ginnane: Harlequin (1980) and The Survivor (1981) and recalls having had a “lovely time” on set in Australia, with a caveat: “I did get the sense the Australian actors didn’t really want the poms coming over to take their jobs.”

It’s often noted that Lancashire-born Powell attended Manchester Grammar School in the 1950s alongside Sir Ben Kingsley – Jesus and Gandhi sharing a classroom. We’re guessing, post- Charles, that a knighthood is out of the question for Powell?

“I think a knighthood has always been out of the question for me,” he guffaws. “I’ve ducked and weaved throughout my career and never worked very hard at establishing that sort of” – he searches for the right phrase –“imperial credential.”

King Charles III Roslyn Packer Theatre, Walsh Bay 2000. 02 9250 1777. www. sydneytheatre.com.au. Various times. $69-$116. Mar 31-Apr 30.

“The play King Charles III is based in very solid reality”