Our Press Officer Steve Pratt plots to find out what the cast of David Reed’s new comedy Guy Fawkes know about the Gunpowder Plot and the people they’re playing.
Ask the actors playing gunpowder plot conspirators in David Reed’s new comedy Guy Fawkes to describe the character they’re playing in just three words and you get some surprising answers. Most of them more than three words.
Robin Simpson plays Catesby, the leader of the gang: “Over-ambitious – is that two words? – bumbling and out of his depth. That’s a lot of words. Far too many words.”
Cassie Vallance, who plays Martha, gets the numbers right – “confused, stroppy, passionate”. So does Andrew Pollard. “Dear old luvvy” is his descriptive trio of bonne mots for Winter with the additional comment: “He’s not really a very masculine figure, shall we say”
Jamie Zubairi is Kit Wright, is an amalgamation of real life plotters the Wright brothers. “Not all there,” is his perhaps unkind three-word summary of Kit. “He likes his food and isn’t always on the ball. He’s always seven steps behind everyone else,” he says. So what’s his motive for joining the plotters? “Because it’s intrigue – and there’s nibbles”.
As well as acting, Jamie is a writer, usually roles for himself. “Kit is the clown role as it were and I find myself quite often in those roles if not making them. It’s very much the gentle clown and that’s what I tend to write. There aren’t many roles for half-Malaysian actors so I began writing for myself,” he explains. “I get bored waiting for the phone to ring. I always have to channel my creativity somehow. I’m an artist and photographer too. It either goes on paper or on paint”.
Jamie is an accomplished, exhibited painter who combined acting and art by appearing as a painter in the background of Christie Hynde’s music video Adding the Blue.
Greg Haiste says – in more than three words – that his character Thomas Percy, is written by David Reed as a “preposterous toff who thinks he’s Errol Flynn”, explaining: “He’s a privileged so-and-so who’s probably a bit of a coward to be honest. He’s vain and innocently arrogant. When he’s showing off he assumes everybody else agrees with him.
“He’s the least politically engaged with the plot. He’s really the showman and fancies stabbing the king so doesn’t like it when Guy Fawkes arrives and says we’re going to blow him up instead. Artistically he envisages a Rembrandt picture of himself standing with a big sword in his hand having killed the king. He thinks it’s going to be called The Brave Thomas Percy Plot not the Gunpowder Plot. Some of his charm is how over the top he is. He’s lovable in his mad way”.
Has Leeds-born Greg ever plotted? He remembers taking a job to get in with the director because he knew the director was directing another play he wanted to be in. “Does that count as plotting?” he wonders.
As one half of the comedy double act Haiste and Lawrence, he’s appeared in the Star Wars saga. Sort of. One of the duo’s short films, namely Ken Loach’s Star Wars, imagined how the story of young Billy Casper would have turned out if directed by socially-aware director Loach but set in a Barnsley comprehensive school in 1969. The sports teacher became Darth Vader, the kindly teacher was Yoda and the headmaster became the Emperor. Haiste says “it’s good fun”. You judge for yourselves by watching on the internet. Another of their short films collected a prize at the Cannes Film Festival in the Straight 8 competition.
Last year he appeared in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Comedy of Errors as one of two sets of twins who get mixed up in the same town on the same day. In complete contrast he can currently be found in the Boris Johnson TV drama This England as one of the scientists responsible for developing the Oxford/Astra Zeneca vaccine. Going from silliness to seriousness is one of the joys of being an actor, he says.
Andrew Pollard is well used to being silly at Christmas. For the past 15 years he’s played pantomime Dame at Greenwich Theatre. Now he’s pleased to be playing the ‘slightly more flamboyant’ theatrical figure of Winter in Guy Fawkes as he often gets cast as uptight Englishmen. I think it’s because I’m tall. On telly I’m usually solicitors or vicars. It’s nice to play someone slightly more flamboyant,” he says.
He calls writing pantomime and Christmas show scripts as his ‘other job’. He was first cast as a performer at Greenwich, then started writing scripts both for that theatre and other companies. There are changes this Christmas as he’s playing an Ugly Sister not the Dame in Poole.
He’s been a regular performer with Northern Broadsides. He went to drama school late – he was 30 – and Barry Rutter’s Northern-based company gave him one of his first jobs and he continued working with them for four or five years.
Before drama school, he worked in street theatre in Bath with a company called Natural Theatre. They travelled the world “doing weird, silly comedy stuff” through the British Council in countries including China, Japan and Kazakhstan. “We worked a lot in Japan and I just loved it,” says Andrew. “I was tall and blond and in a place that didn’t get many tourists, and we got mobbed if we went outside or shopping. It’s the only time I felt what it was like to be a film star. It was bizarre, lots of screaming schoolkids. Now I only get screaming kids at pantomime.”
As a mother of two boys and co-creator with Janet Bruce of Yorkshire children’s theatre company Story Craft Theatre, Cassie Vallance is well used to young audiences but is relishing playing with (and to) adults as Martha in Guy Fawkes. “It’s lovely to be in a rehearsal space where there’s lots of fun and laughter, sword-fighting, explosions, a revolving stage …” she explains.
Martha is “confused, stroppy, passionate” (full marks for keeping it to three words). She’s the wife of Thomas Percy and sister to Kit. She knows Guy from way back so we can perhaps expect romance at some point.
She’s very happy with her “wonderful costumes that are ridiculously brilliant – very flamboyant, very decadent and very colourful”. They are also very big and wide, making simply entering a room a tight squeeze. “My hips are humongous and my bottom is very big as well,” explains Cassie.
Story Craft Theatre organises weekly sessions at York Theatre Royal and Theatre 41 as well as parties and touring across North Yorkshire, currently with a Halloween show. “Janet and I were both mums with young children and met through a mutual friend. From there we started running parties, storytelling sessions and theatre pop-ups. We were fortunate to keep running all through the covid lockdown by doing our stuff online,” she says.
Those who recall her scene-stealing performance as Fabian in Twelfth Night at Shakespeare’s Rose Theatre in York in 2019 already know what a great comic performer she is. “A lot of my previous work has been family theatre as well as so there’s a lot of comedy and fun involved and with that comes interaction with the audience. That’s not to say I haven’t done serious roles and Guy Fawkes is a great balance between the two of them , comedy and drama. It’s a tragi-comedy so we get to do both – and dress up as well.”
Robin Simpson will barely have opened in Guy Fawkes before he’s putting on a frock to rehearse as Mrs Smee in this year’s York Theatre Royal pantomime All New Adventures of Peter Pan. This follows his star turn with Paul Hawkyard as Ugly Sisters in Cinderella last year. He does, however, admit to a special fondness for his first time as Dame at York in The Travelling Pantomime which toured to 18 community venues around the city. “It was such a lovely show and a nice idea for the audience to vote on which pantomime they wanted to see. It was such a sweet little show, a nice cast and good to go out to different places.”
His character in Guy Fawkes is Robert Catesby, the leader of the plot who got the gang together but quickly lost control. Like many of us, the actor had heard of Guy Fawkes and the Gunpowder Plot but knew little of the ins- and- outs plot.
For research he relied on the play’s writer David (“the font of all knowledge”) Reed although director Gemma Fairlie sent the cast off to research. “We had to learn about a particular bit of history so we had some background to the Guy Fawkes story. My particular topic was the Spanish Armada which isn’t directly linked but it’s all to do with the Catholics and Protestants,” says Robin.
He’s fresh from Harrogate Theatre’s return to old-style rep with Robin taking leading roles in three plays in four weeks. It was, says Robin, fascinating but hard work. Afterwards the producers owned up to giving him too much to do. “I had quite big roles in all three plays which, from a learning lines point of view, is just too difficult. Some of the other actors were only in two shows, some were in all three but didn’t have big roles, so I certainly drew the short straw.
“But it’s a fascinating process and audiences were really appreciative. By the end you could tell the amount of people who’d been to see all three or at least one other show. That loyalty was nice to see. There’s a lot to be said for the repertory system with a family of actors that the audience gets to know and see them in different parts which is always interesting to do.
“Sometimes they play parts they wouldn’t ordinarily y be cast as. In the Harrogate season I probably wasn’t ideal casting for any of the parts. I was a little too old for two and young for the other. I was cast because I could play all three. So it’s interesting from both an audience and an actor’s point of view.”
Guy Fawkes runs 28 October-12 November – book your tickets now via our Box Office on 01904 623568 or online at yorktheatreroyal.co.uk
